I think this is really commendable. When you put your money where your mouth is you really show that you're serious about your values.
All the best to the forty future winners of this grant!
This is excellent marketing at best, and nothing to do with values. Lambda school is a YC portfolio company, and this program/post has gotten YC and LS oodles of positive press. The gender of this batch is designed to generate positive buzz, there was never any restriction on admissions before this announcement, no bias in getting into LS. So what exactly is this supposed to achieve?
I recently completed a very difficult job search where I unfortunately had to lean on my ethnicity (I’m Mexican) to pass through very overt screening against white men. I was shocked to hear from multiple companies, large and small, that they did not want men and white men in particular.
Now we see a YC co-founder giving 40 women $9000 to learn to program.
Where does it end? I was really sad that while I personally can survive in this environment (if I abandon my ideals of not being judged by my genetics), many good men who are passionate about their work are being pressured from all sides.
I honestly don’t see how any of this is legal but it’s such a taboo to talk about that fixing the problem seems impossible without a major shift back to valuing skills above demographics.
A legal justification doesn't make something right.
It's also worth mentioning why the term "underrepresented minority" or "underrepresented group" is need in the first place. Considering how sexist and racist people claim tech is Asians seem to be doing perfectly fine which is exactly why the term URM is needed in the first place.
I have sadly witnessed a lot of discrimination against white men recently as well. God forbid you happen to be a white man from a third-world country, you'll literally never get a single interview anywhere no matter how good you happen to be.
Third world country is bad (although maybe the positive racial discrimination will count them in, I don't know) but the people who get screwed by this sort of thing are also the white working class. Most employers have some (fairly rational as well as irrational) desire to screen by class, alongside the people of the upper classes knowing how to game the system of education/etc. So when you push women and ethnicities in, you push white men out, and the ones who feel the pinch are the ones already onto a loser.
I've seen even more against Asian men (not that it makes discrimination again white men any more okay). After all, if we are going to strive for for equal representation - which seems to be the goal - Asian are going to have to go down from 30-40% of many large companies down to a fraction of that. Asians are 14% of California and 5.2% of the US population.
This is the currently acceptable form of prejudice in this country, yes. It is totally fine to enact policies or make statements that hurt Asian-American men (and women, I don't think gender is much of a factor here).
They were getting lynched up into the 1900s by whites and Hispanics, put in camps in the mid 1900s, and discriminated against up until just a few generations ago, and now they're expected to lay down and be trodden upon, or else. Very cool, very progressive.
I thought Visa sponsorship was the issue for third-world countries,I and many of my friends (local code meetup) share the same story ; apply to 150+ companies and not a single response.
We are white from North-Africa.
I stopped applying abroad because these kind of "diversity" policies scare me because they're mostly ethnic based I believe it should be idea based otherwise you end up with a group that all think alike.
It’s not apparently obvious what ethnicity I am based on looks. I had already been told there was a focus on diversity at the company I ended up getting an offer at and they “really want to build a diverse team from the ground up”. The conversation had been dragging for months and I resisted bringing up my background out of principle. I saw the hiring manager tweeting about a Latinx conference (I hate that term) and bit the bullet and told them I’m Latinx. I had an offer by the end of the week. This was after months of similar discussions with other companies where I stuck to my ideal of being hired for what I’ve accomplished and the skills I can prove I have. Ultimately I was running out of money and got desperate. I still feel terrible and angry but I have to put food on the table.
Thanks for being honest about your experience. Though I wouldn't be surprised if you get downvoted for your unencumbered authenticity because it doesn't match the narrative du jour.
Edit: it does seem like you're being downvoted. I predict manfredo's response will be next[1]. Sigh.
I've been in the same situation and I cringe about it. I am a Latino but white because I am from Argentina where people are mostly from European backgrounds. It seems that "Latino" is meant to mean a specific group of Latinos actually and not the whites ones but technically with the word "Latino" I also qualify. But I would like to hear them tell me to my face why I am not a Latino.
Asquerosa la situacion, pero entiendo porque lo hiciste. Latinx es un termino gringo que me hace cagar de riza lol. Por el culo, somos Latinos y Latinas. No LaTiNX.
I'm not surprised nonbinary Latinx people hear the same talk about the terms they ask people to use for them. I wasn't sure about Latinx, but now I'm firmly for it.
Yeah this stuff is getting pretty absurd. Someday in the future we’ll have grants for ugly people or short people because every little inequality must be erased in the human collective.
Except it's not your children, it's your arbitrary fashion-based tribal identity. (Gender isn't a fashion choice, no, but the choice to focus on gender over height, good looks, class, race, etc is very much a fashion that quickly shifts).
We never really valued skills over demographics — it's just much less visible where it benefits a dominant group. Consider that the percentage of VC deals with female-founded companies is 5.4% and yet they receive only 2.2% of VC dollars [1]. This has held true for over a decade: the average female founders have received less than their average male counterparts. But for some reason, there aren't many people complaining that VCs are giving men money just because they're men!
> Consider that the percentage of VC deals with female-founded companies is 5.4% and yet they receive only 2.2% of VC dollars
Stats like this are so useless. Obviously if males make up 95% of the pool they're more likely to have founded some of the unicorns, therefore skewing the average. If one of the 5% of females founded a unicorn I bet they'd have a greater share of VC dollars.
The reason that companies become unicorns is that VCs invest in them at a certain valuation. You have cause and effect reversed. If VCs are underinvesting in female-founded companies, it's entirely expected that fewer of those companies will become unicorns.
Never heard of an open and blatant 'women need not apply' in the 20 years I've been in the US. Not in the universities, not in the workplace, not anywhere. Not sure about NFL policies, though there aren't that many 6 foot 250 pounds fit women out there. Pretty sure there is no VC advertising 'we will fund no women' out there, if it were there would be a huge press coverage.
And yet, the OP is openly and blatant 'men need not apply'. How is that ever OK?
Because men have many other options. If it was just 1 or 2 places saying 'we won't fund women', then those places don't substantially affect womens' ability to get funded. But that isn't the case.
My point is, blatantly saying "X need not apply" isn't any worse than saying "this opportunity is open to both X and Y" and then only accepting Y. Implicit discrimination isn't somehow better than explicit.
* Implicit discrimination is bad. I'm saying: To use that as a guide for your actions you need to have an implicit discrimination detector able to account for all the confounding variables.
* Explicit discrimination is also bad. I'm saying: As a corollary, there should not be explicit 'X need not apply' policies.
The NFL does allow women to apply, and one has tried, though that appeared to be just a publicity stunt.
There are a few women who play college football, and they are eligible to apply in the more traditional manner. With college experience and professional coaching it's not completely impossible that they could make it, probably as kickers or punters, who don't need as much upper body strength as other positions.
It is illegal to discriminate for jobs on the basis of sex in the US (as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964). If you believe yourself to be the victim of discrimination, then submit a complaint the the EEOC [1] who will investigate.
That being said, a large gap between the number men and women (or whites and blacks, etc) working at companies exist can be considered evidence of systematic discrimination. Increasing the pool of unrepresented applicants is a great way to ensure that a diverse pool of qualified candidates get interviews, thus reduce the likelihood that a company appears to be practicing discrimination during hiring.
Statistically speaking, an equal opportunity workforce should be comprised of some demographic makeup. If a company deviates dramatically from that target makeup, the implication is that hiring practices are unfair. Addressing the unfairness will cause the issue to naturally correct itself.
This is a sound strategy that's commonly applied to other areas of engineering. If a company produces bearings and their QA department measures bearing tolerances from a shipment sample to deviate wildly from what is expected, then the implication is their is an issue with the manufacturing process that needs to be addressed. They don't just toss a handful of under-tolerant bearing in the shipment to bring the median value inline.
In other words:
> By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent
...Is where your misunderstanding is. This idea is not over-correction -- you do no need to discriminate to achieve a specific makeup. You explicitly need to NOT discriminate and the problem will be correct itself.
ELI5: If a company was found to have a workforce that was too short. An appropriate response is to notice the problem an conduct an investigation, which determines tall people were put off from applying because the doors were too short. They correct the doors and the average height of employees naturally correct.
A wrong approach is to explicitly weight taller people more favorable in interviews.
>working at companies exist can be considered evidence of systematic discrimination.
No it can't unless you show that there are an equal number of qualified candidates, which there aren't in tech. CS grad rates for women are much lower.
I can confirm your observations. At my company we have a couple policies.
1. We only accept applicstions from candidate from non-traditional backgrounds if they're diverse. Diverse is defined as any of the following: women, black, Hispanic, or native American - maybe also veterans but I'm not sure. Non-traditional background means coming from a coding boot camp, or majoring in a non-computing related field. I think after 3 years industry experience candidates are considered traditional even if they came from one of those two.*
2. Diverse candidates get two attempts to pass the technical phone interview, non diverse get one.*
That said, when it comes to the hiring decision we don't discriminate. No disrespect for those candidates considered diverse, just take what you get. And I'm Cuban myself (but not visibly Latino) so I may have benefitted from that part of my identity myself.
Untimely I think the lower representation of Black and Hispanic people in tech roles is reflective of education rates. I suspect that were incomes and education more equal that would make representation in tech more equal. There also geography. Not many tech companies in the south where most black people live.
As for women thats a more difficult situation. I think that there's strong evidence to back up the claim that women may not choose to enter tech on their own volition. I think the solution to that is to emphasize the value of fields other than tech. Being coder at Google doesn't make a person any more valuable than a lawyer, marketer, salesperson, etc. Sure they may make more money, but that's the product of the labor market. And not to mention the average lawyer probably makes more than the average coder.
I've anecdotally seen a growing portion of coding boot camp that are exclusive to certain demographics. I wonder how much of that is due to policies like these. Especially for boot camps that only charge if the graduates get jobs in tech, I can see how it would be disadvantageous to admit white and Asian men.
* Edit: I just checked and these policies also apply to people with referrals. So one could justify this by saying we treat diverse candidates as though they have a referral.
> Diverse candidates get two attempts to pass the technical phone interview, non diverse get one.
These rhyme with soviet era policies circa 1950-1960 in Eastern Europe. At universities, there was an admission exam for 'healthy origin' people for the majority of the spots, and then another exam where everybody, including those failing the first time, could compete for the scraps. We all know how that turned out economically speaking.
Seeing the same policies in XXI century USA is surreal.
To be fair, the tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The media has been heavily pushing the narrative that women are underrepresented at these tech companies - and they are compared to the general population. But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with the percentages of tech workers that are women. Same sort of deal with URM.
Ironically, the concern over discrimination in tech is itself the cause of a significant amount of explicit discrimination.
> But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with the percentages of tech workers that are women.
If the industry is systematically unfavorable to women, hiring at the same percentage as the industry as a whole (which is what matching the “percentage of tech workers that are women” is) is indicative of being fully on-line with the average degree to which the industry is systematically unfavorable to women.
It would be inconsistent to criticize the industry but not firms that were dead in the middle of the pack.
Sure, but everyone seems to be assuming that it's systematically unfavorable towards women solely based on the fact that women make up less than parity.
That claim only works if one assumes that any disparity is the result of systematic bias.
If the industry were either actually or even merely perceived as systematically unfavorable to women, a natural consequence would be women being less likely to pursue education focussed on the field in preference to other fields that were less unfavorable.
There are many other factors that can come into play. It is simply incorrect to draw the conclusions you do.
One example is earning prospects, which might matter more for men than for women. Personally, I was torn between studying maths and film making, for example. I decided to go for maths because of the better money making prospects (I thought), thinking I could still go into film making later.
If you don't worry about income prospects, maybe you are more likely to choose English literature of the 16th century over engineering.
I don't think the person you're replying to is criticizing the industry though. From what I can tell, they're saying it's not the industry's fault that it lacks women.
That's how I see it anyway: mainly based on the fact that women make up only around 20% of CS majors, I don't think the issue lies in the hiring practices of most tech companies.
> I don't think the person you're replying to is criticizing the industry though.
No, but the people they are criticizing for criticizing firms hiring at industrt-average proprotions are also criticizing the industry, which is the issue.
If it's any consolation about how we underrepresented but unqualified idiots are getting hired everywhere, I've interviewed with Mozilla a couple of times now, selecting the "yep, I'm Mexican" tickbox, and this hasn't gotten me any more hired there either of the times I've interviewed.
I must be really awful if I can't get hired as a Mexican, eh?
This misrepresentating my company's approach. We don't hire underqualified applicants if they're diverse. Rather we deliberately make it harder for white and Asian men to get to the on-site.
Openly... I'm not so sure. In our all hands meeting our head of HR consistently denies that diverse candidates are treated differently. When the Damore memo was sent out one of our senior VPs of engineering explicitly denied preference for diverse candidates.
But we do have tools for recruiters to cross reference applicant names with the US census bureau's data to infer race and gender. We give recruiter bigger bonuses for diverse hires and we set specific % targets for them in their OKRs (basically quarterly goals. They don't get fired if they go under this, so I hesitate to call it a quota). That, and the aforementioned practices surrounding interviews and non traditional backgrounds.
Looking deeper at the documentation, I think the company maintains plausible deniability by giving recruiters discretionary authority over things like number of phone interviews and initial resume review coupled with hiring targets well above the industry average (current target for women is 33%). So the company does openly discriminate, but it gives recruiters the tools and discretion to discriminate as well as goals that essentially require discrimination to achieve - after that it's "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".
My previous statements about non traditional backgrounds and 2nd phone interviews came from recruiters themselves. I can also confirm that, absent a referral, I've done 2nd phone screens for diverse candidates and have never interviewed a non-diverse candidate from a non-traditional background.
It's like we have given HR an a goal, namely diversity, that's easier to measure and doesn't require the technical knowledge of measuring skill, I can see how that gets very popular, very fast.
That's so strange to me, how do you define equal opportunity when you directly affect that opportunity based on third party factors out of someones control.
So 40-45% of the population gets the shaft is what you're saying. While I understand a desire to have a more diverse company in general.. the overall population is definitely not 1:1:1:1 for each ethnic/gender group... And every tech hiring study I've seen seems to indicate a bias in favor of women, meaning the issue is either self-selective or generally in education circles, which is driving the issue.
I've already resigned myself that I must tell him to always check those minority boxes and he may want to consider only using his mother's surname on his resume, instead of the traditional dual surname he legally has (Example: Lopez, instead of Smith Lopez).
My plan would be to send my kids to dual language programs. If you're a somewhat native Spanish speaker, you can claim to be Hispanic with a clear conscience. "Hispanic" is, legally speaking (for now), an "ethnicity", not a race, which means it is independent of blood (but apparently race is a "socio-political construct" according to the US Census). People are already doing this, plus the people with one Mexican grandparent or something.
This farcical system can't go on forever as is. Either racial preferences in hiring will be banned under the 14th amendment, or the US will adopt a Brazil-style racial preference system, where they will actually test your blood and have technicians measure the tone of your skin and the shape of your face in order to fit you into a category.
> We use inclusive definitions of “women” and “female” and welcome trans women, genderqueer women, and non-binary people who are female-identified.
If you are interested in the program, it seems like you could identify yourself as female and apply. Especially if there's no in-person interview.
Cynically, if enough [biological males who identify as] men elect to identify as women for this application, the selection team will have some very difficult decisions to make.
This is a great way to get a company to instantly reject you at the interview step if they have one or fired shortly after being hired.
Because, you know, most companies look up the profile of candidates on LinkedIn, social media etc. Unless you actually consider yourself transgender, you would quickly be caught and removed just as quickly.
>Unless you actually consider yourself transgender, you would quickly be caught and removed just as quickly.
In the current cultural zeitgeist it'd be unimaginable to see someone get fired because they didn't conform to someone's rules of "transgender enough" based on their social media profile.
This is both the beauty and the irony of said zeitgeist; make all the rules you want, can't stop someone from playing.
And let's not forget the very real cases where someone may be more comfortable telling a bootcamp something about themselves than _the entire world_ on social media
Yes, you can actually. These sort of arguments remind me of the transgender bathroom fears: What's stopping a man from pretending to be transgender in order to enter the woman's bathroom?
Well, the answer is that people that are transgender will have a history of being transgender or acting in such a way that confirms they consider themselves that gender. So any lawsuit as a result of this would look into your past, see that you lied about being transgender and make it an open and shut case. If that case became public then you could say goodbye to your job prospects.
You either accept that people can choose their own gender or you don't. People don't get to police the reason someone may identify as female or male. History on social media should have nothing to do with it. Do you think everyone makes this choice at an early age and broadcasts it publicly?
As I understand it, you sort of get to choose your gender, but society has to accept your choice.
If I declare myself a woman but make no attempt to "live as a woman" as society sees it, I'll appear to be taking advantage of the system, and my choice will be rejected and there will be social consequences.
Conversely, if I do appear to be making an honest attempt to be a woman, and you don't accept it because of your conservative values, then you cannot reject my choice, because that's bigoted.
Yes, you can change your mind about your gender, but you really need to do it in a life-upending way that feels risky and permanent and committed, then you'll be celebrated. If you phone it in, people are going to be offended and you'll be rejected.
What does it mean to "live as a woman" besides being called "she"? Wear lots of makeup and pretty dresses? I guess the XX women who don't dress like a 90s Barbie doll aren't "living as women", then.
How would you define "live as a woman" in a way that would be acceptable to all women?
It would be both sexist and transphobic to expect trans-women to "appear to be making an honest attempt to be a woman" by conforming to some outdated view of womanhood.
Cis-women can do anything (including any traditionally male activity like date other women, wear jeans, like football and monster trucks, like anime and video games, and in some cases, even grow beards) so why can't trans-women?
Trans women can do whatever they want, all I meant is that if people are only changing their gender on paper to have more opportunities, that's considered dishonest and unacceptable... At least, I thought that's how it worked.
As I mention in my other comments on this thread, it's not right to judge people on why they identify with a particular gender. Whether it's economically motivated or not, if you accept that people can choose their own gender, the reason for the choice doesn't matter.
It's weird that you bring this up in a comment thread about someone literally advocating for lying about their gender for the sake of some perceived competitive advantage.
Do you believe this to be ethical? Because to me I find it rather offensive considering it harms actual transgender candidates.
I wouldn’t judge someone for changing their gender for economic purposes. It’s a personal decision and a slippery slope to decide when it’s ok and when it’s not ok.
There is a level of salary discrepancy where I would transition and start living as a woman, probably somewhere around the point of women earning 50 to 60% more. I'm not even sure it would be a lie; gender is pretty unimportant to me, and at some point the potential gains overcome inertia and habit.
I'm sympathetic to anyone who's had a challenging job search, and am glad that you found something.
Society is worse off for having barriers that prevent anyone who wants to code from being able to do so. That includes the inefficiencies of the job industry not placing you into a productive coding role faster. But it also includes the lower salaries, lack of support/representation, belittling, and near-universal campaign of horrible harassment that every woman I've talked to in the field has experienced.
Everyone in the field of software development struggles, and I don't want to take away from that. We should be making life easier for everyone. But doing so involves recognizing problems specifically and succinctly, and building solutions that fit those problems. One of society's many problems is that women in tech have to contend with a nightmarish swirl of negative distractions that I've never had to think about as a white man. In the face of such a problem, giving resources to the effected population makes total sense, and it's a good thing that more organizations/companies are doing so. Even more than that, it brings us closer to meritocratic equality.
Women are in extremely high demand in the tech industry. This post is just another example of a benefit women get but men don't. As a hiring manager I can say I've definitely been encouraged to pay women more than equally equipped men because their presence on the team is deemed so valuable.
I have applied for women's scholarships but not without feeling guilty. Why do I get a chance at something while as many eager men in need of financial assistance or technical mentorship do not?
I am appreciative of every opportunity I have been given and will continue to take advantage of any opportunity afforded to me, even if it is on the base of my gender. If an investor wants to help a certain group of people, I will value that they are providing opportunities even though I may disagree with the idea of providing opportunities based on immutable characteristics.
Similar scenario that was sadly disturbing. It is quite advantageous to have an ethnic origin as a Pacific Islander.
However some people I have met from southern Asia coming from a farming family background likely have had much worse conditions growing up. But they get lumped into the Asian mass where you must truly excel to get noticed.
I don't live in USA but a couple of years back I was working for a large financial organization in my country and was flat out told don't even think you are getting promoted because we need to lift our diversity so no white men will be promoted.
This can only end when customers - from individuals to corporations - finally get fed up with the identity politics employed by these 'diversity' advocates and start shunning companies which profess adherence to this mantra. If this does not happen it will end when diversity has run its course and the population has been balkanised into nothing but oppressors and oppressed with the average size of the oppressed community being a single individual. Since by that time the economy will have ground to a halt they'll be fighting each other with sticks and stones.
Spreading this as far and wide as I can. Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years and there are too many programs and teachers that teach it poorly, alienating large segments of the population. Lambda is among the best. I hope they can scale past 40 students for this in the future.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Also, please stop posting flamebait, especially ideological flamebait, to HN. It fuels flamewars, which destroy what we want to preserve here: thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity. Assuming those are things you also want, you're welcome to post here in that spirit.
Coding was compared to literacy here. Literacy is taught in schools because people of average IQ (100) are capable of literacy and find it helpful in their everyday lives.
Literacy is one of the few things taught in schools that actually has any utility in people's everyday lives.
Coding is nothing like literacy. It is more like chemistry, physics or Shakespeare - something the vast majority don't care about and will quickly forget. If you have any doubt - poll the population on Newton's three laws of motion and why they matter.
Regarding idealogical flamebait - I don't even know what that is - I'm simply expressing my opinion, that the above has hopefully clarified. If you find my stance on the school system offensive, rest assured I'll no longer reply on the matter in this thread, seeing how quick others are to judge others in a negative light.
That is a much more substantive comment! there wouldn't have been a moderation issue if you'd posted that to begin with.
One way to think of flamebait is low-information comments on provocative topics. Ideological flamebait is the same,
on topics where the provocation tends to be ideological.
> Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years...
I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders. You need sales, marketing, accounting, management, HR, legal - and even the IT guys often truck along fine with little to no coding skills.
If you need code written to perform your task that usually just means the UI of your application isn't powerful enough. So get a coder to add that feature to the UI. You don't need to become a coder yourself.
Here's why we really need "more coders" all the time:
- the web frontend is getting reinvented every year
- the latest trends in infrastructure design ("terascale micro-micro-micro-services as a service") need attention
- the latest devices and platform SDKs need to be dealt with
- the insane amount of technical debt accumulated through all this churn needs to be paid off
Which is all fine only as long as the money keeps rolling in.
> > Coding is as critical as literacy for the next 20 years...
> I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders
It would be absurd if coding skill were only useful to people whose job title and central role is “coder” (just as viewing literacy as central would be absurd if measured by the number of people employed as “writers”.)
Jessica made a really good point, that female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her. Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.
> Jessica made a really good point, female founders without any coding knowledge can't even assess whether a coder is any good before hiring him or her.
If I followed this line of reasoning, then I couldn't hire a lawyer without knowing law, I couldn't hire a marketing person without knowing marketing, I couldn't hire a sales person without knowing sales, and so on and so forth. I would argue that knowledge in law, sales and marketing are far more important to a founder, yet people obsess over coding.
> Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.
I don't think that's true. To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level. Secondly, it's credentials like work experience and education that you go by when hiring. I'm aware that a lot of software developers are often forced to pass lots of silly programming tests, but that's known to not result in better hiring.
If you are a founder and non-technical, you shouldn't hire a random developer anyway. You should have a technical co-founder that you can trust and you should focus on literally everything else. You'll need to do a thousand things, but writing code isn't really one of them.
>To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level
If you want to be as accurate as possible, then yes. But there is a whole spectrum of accuracy in-between those two options, and being "somewhat ok" (which is what this program, I assume, is supposed to help the attendees achieve) is better than "completely guessing, because I have zero relevant knowledge"
Charlemagne reportedly ruled his empire despite being illiterate [0]. Christians were able to worship before they could read or even have access to printed Bibles. Literacy allows for creation and understanding beyond what can be attained via delegating the ability to read and write. It’s the same with coding, and I think you aren’t seeing how coding — or rather, being able to think the way code requires — is an ability that goes beyond building a web app. Here’s a good write up from author Clive Thompson about how he learned to code, and how it helped him, when he was writing a book:
> Literacy allows for creation and understanding beyond what can be attained via delegating the ability to read and write. It’s the same with coding, and I think you aren’t seeing how coding — or rather, being able to think the way code requires — is an ability that goes beyond building a web app.
Yeah I've heard the meme that "coding teaches you how to think". I don't buy it. I could make the same unsubstantiated claim about playing chess or some other mental gymnastics.
> Here’s a good write up from author Clive Thompson about how he learned to code, and how it helped him, when he was writing a book
He doesn't really give very convincing examples that it helped him professionally, but the time investment was substantial. That's called a hobby.
Yes, you could try to make that same unsubstantiated claim about chess, except that programming is not only its own, large and profitable profession, but one that actually intersects with a majority of today's industries and actual work.
My girlfriend, a nurse of 10+ years, just started learning to code on her own, built her first (basic) website (https://www.nataliepeterson.dev) and is applying to Lambda School already. I sent this to her this morning and she was elated.
For whatever reason this website feels so personal. Instant flashbacks to the 2000s. I love it.
Hint for picking a random image when clicking on the image: The currently shown image should be excluded from the list of images to draw from. This prevents the problem that sometimes clicks appear to do nothing, although in reality the same image was randomly picked again.
I forgot she added this for me. She doesn't know I posted this here and thinks I'm her only visitor still. She'll be embarrassed, but I told her if she's not embarrassed with her first version, she's shipping too late.
I've been really happy to see all the nice personal sites and blogs that people have been creating on .dev domains, this included. It feels like the Web of the late 90s that I grew up in.
She can send a oneliner PR to get her site included on https//fullname.dev if she wants, and if she hasn't yet started using GutHub this would be a good learning opportunity for it.
My girlfriend is in an incredibly similar position, shes an embryologist pursuing a CS degree, but it's at a super old traditional school and their tech isn't sexy web dev javascript type tech.
Do you or your girlfriend have any advice for her? A good tutorial or course or book that's been really helpful to your girlfriend and can help mine ship something soon?
Lovely website! One suggestion: it looks like the image is randomized on each click - the UX is that sometimes it doesn't work, because the randomly chosen image is (presumably) the same one - so probably the better choice would be to randomly chose a different image.
This reminds me so much of when I started (almost 5 years ago now). My then boyfriend shared his interest in design and development and I ended up taking some programming courses for fun. I had no clue wtf I was doing for so long but I liked it...I also made a little app and made my brother click a button that spit out the text "You're stupid".
The courses and self teaching went a long way. I started at a crappy digital design agency and now work at a company many people have heard of!
Good luck to your girlfriend! I'm inspired by her.
I love that site! Feels refreshing and old. Nice to see that not everyone learns to code these days by following a terrible React tutorial that gives them nearly a gigabyte of dependencies for a simple project.
My girlfriend is in an incredibly similar position, shes an embryologist pursuing a CS degree, but it's at a super old traditional school and their tech isn't sexy web dev javascript type tech.
Do you or your girlfriend have any advice for her? A good tutorial or course or book that's been really helpful to your girlfriend and can help mine ship something soon?
If it's an online programming class, then why not extent the offer to people based outside the US? This US protectionism thing is driving me crazy.
I'll offer my services to Lambda School and/or YC for free if that means I can extent this offer to EU people, provided that my living expenses are covered. I'm in between jobs so I have the perfect schedule for it.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They include: Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
(This is nowhere near the worst guideline violation in this thread, but it's such a precise one.)
I have several female friends who find Affirmative Action campaigns so off-putting, they decide against joining the industry.
One friend recently complained to me that all the AA enthusiasts just want to talk about feminism and women in the workplace, and not about actually writing code. She was incensed because she was invited to a 'Girls Code' meetup, where women would learn about algorithms by modelling their own menstrual cycles[0]. She was (understandably) frustrated, saying that her interests extend beyond what comes out of her genitals.
This is anecdotal, sure, but amongst my social circle, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
I sense a bazillion downvotes coming my way. You may think these opinions I am passing along are incredibly incorrect, but they are the opinions of women.
EDIT: It took no time at all for the downvotes to arrive, as expected. There is no such thing as the sisterhood. Feminists will immediately cast out any woman who doesn't hold the "right" opinions.
This isn't as rare as it sounds, when I was young and a lot more arrogant+principled, I refused to go to my (not actually paying/good) college's Oxbridge interview prep, also ruled out medicine as a career choice partly because in the UK at the time to get in you had to do charity work/specific extra-curriculars.
Insane reasoning looking back, but hey 17 year olds are often principled nutcases. I can definitely imagine doing what you describe re compsci if I was a 17 year old girl in 2019. Hope any principled girls (in my biased opinion the brightest/best people in the end) we lose from information tech go into something else useful, kind of a sad thought.
Thanks for chiming in. I’m not a woman, but I think it’s important to highlight these opinions because people like you and my friends do exist, although you’d never think it from the typical discourse on this topic.
From the discussion/debate I’ve had in the past, I perceive a strong overlap between people who would aggressively dismiss these women’s opinions, and also people who say we should “just listen to women”.
I have no agenda to push women into tech specifically, but coincidentally most of the people I have mentored and brought into tech have been women. This is likely because I’m in tech, and I’ve always spent more time with women. It puts me in an awkward position when I encourage a woman to attend an event like Rails Girls (which I had heard is an excellent experience for women), and then that woman comes back and says she hated it, and that very few of the women there actually wanted to do any programming, and that most of them just wanted to talk about gender politics.
There will be benefits to this program for those who participate, and I wholly wish those women who have the opportunity to participate the best of luck.
However, I also worry about the motives behind the program. A huge part of feminism is a push towards gender equality[1]. Discriminating against half of the population while aiming for equality is an odd way to behave.
I know the blog post did not mention gender equality as a goal, but I just completely fail to see how discrimination like this will lead to anything but increased inter-gender conflict and the persistence of stereotypes in the field.
I don't understand why you're getting down voted for this comment. Isn't the goal equal opportunity? Providing artificial silo'd environments seems at odds to the goal of an unbiased, fair workplace.
In much of silicon valley, the goal is equal outcomes not equal opportunity. Often times explicitly unequal opportunity is necessary to achieve equal outcomes.
The premise here is that opportunity wasn't equal to begin with. To accept this premise, you have to also accept the premise that societal restrictions on the roles permitted to women, culturally imposed limits on womens' ability to gain power and authority (the "glass ceiling") and persistent beliefs about women being intellectually inferior to men in regards to certain fields, would lead to a status quo not of meritocracy or equality but prejudice against women in an otherwise 'unbiased' system.
And so, to further the goal of equal opportunity, one must balance an already unbalanced set of scales. Not to do so is merely to accept its bias as the status quo.
> Not to do so is merely to accept its bias as the status quo.
This is a biased interpretation itself that assumes there is preexisting bias. It is true that the premise requires acceptance of the ideas you put forth above, but the issue is that many people don't believe those are enough of a factor anymore to justify discrimination. Imbalance does not always equate to unfairness.
I think the gist of things like this is - at the risk of using a silly gaming analogy for something really serious - a "catch up mechanic" to bring about more equal representation sooner than just being genuinely fair and waiting for things to even out.
There are philosophical cases to be made that the wrong must be righted asap, or that this approach is an instance of two wrongs not making a right.
For me, assuming good intentions, I choose other things to be upset about than people being selectively nice or helpful to others who are dealing with a problem.
I can understand the concern that leaning too hard in to this kind of thing can get out of hand, so as with everything, probably best to do our research and decide case by case.
Who cares what the motives are? She's offering to pay for 40 women to code out of her own pocket; it's a nice thing to do but overall not a big deal even if you were against the idea of a more balanced gender composition in the field (I'm not suggesting you are, I am only saying even if someone were, 40 women is a drop in the bucket). The reason why the money is offered exclusively to women is because men typically dominate the roster within programming environments. Maybe you think this is because women aren't interested in coding, but I'd argue that the 40 women who spend their summer working through this program have already demonstrated an interest if not an aptitude. I just don't see what the problem is.
Jessica explicitly says in her blog post that many of the women who consider applying to YCombinator have a lot of useful business skills and domain expertise for the business they want to start, but are held back because they can't code an initial version of the product.
My comment was in regards to a young daughter asking how she could break into the start-up world. The author suggested that coding was a good idea.
The author went on to mention that learning in the span of a summer would help pick a good team member or even build a prototpe him/herself.
We know from both studies and personal experience, that tech interviews just don't work all that well. This is tech interviews done by professional programmers and managers. We don't know how to pick people who are good vs talk like they're good!
This is not anecdotal - it is well known via studies, done by top psychologists.
Given that - how would a summer coding bootcamp help pick a co-founder? It's certainly better than nothing. It is also not clear how much one would benefit from 3 months versus taking one of the many excellent online courses and working at your own pace, such as Harvard's CS50, freely available on youtube.
Regarding building your own prototype after 3 months of programming - I just want to throw my hands up in the air of this wishful thinking that 3 months is anywhere close to enough time. You will need someone who's tech savvy, and then you're right back to the same difficulties.
I'm trying to figure out on what side of the debate I fall on this one.
On the one hand, women have obviously been disadvantaged in many ways, for many years, which is wrong. The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender.
On the other hand, a for-profit company deciding to offer free services to individual women, who may or may not be disadvantaged, simply because they're women, doesn't sit well with me either. Frankly, it seems likely that anyone who applies to lambda school (either gender), probably lean towards the more advantaged end than the less advantaged end. So it seems likely this is going to result in women with plenty of advantages already, receiving $9000 worth of education for free, while explicitly denying this opportunity to men, and continuing to disadvantage members of both groups.
So, I guess my question is, why is this morally OK? If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people, or disadvantaged women, or if it was a non-profit, it seems like this would be an easier call for me.
> discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender.
Is there any evidence that this is happening, though? I've never seen anybody, even anecdotally claim "I'm a woman (who is qualified) and I've been unable to find employment". Mostly what I see is people trying to work backwards and say, "if group X makes up Y% of the population and only Z% of programmers, that in itself must be evidence of discrimination".
It doesn't have to be overt, or even knowingly done. Children are frequently subtly pushed towards different careers because of their gender, many times by their devoted parents. It's a societal problem.
"The results of this study show that males assess their own mathematical
competence higher than their otherwise equal female counterparts"
"self-assessments of task competence were found to influence career-relevant decisions, even when controlling for commonly accepted measures of ability. For males and females, the higher they rate
their mathematical competence, the greater the odds that they will continue on the path leading to careers in the quantitative professions. However, since males tend to overestimate their mathematical competence
relative to females, males are also more likely to pursue activities leading
down a path toward a career in science, math, and engineering."
My GF demonstrated an aptitude for STEM at an early age. She received an enormous amount of pressure to continue down that track despite not being interested in it as a career.
Your claim may have been true at one time, but I don't think it has been for awhile now.
*Edit: In response to your paper: It looks like it's a research paper, not a study, written almost 20 years ago, referencing material that was ~10 years old at the time of its publication. It well may have been true, but the time the original research was collected (in the 90s) is about the time I'd argue a major cultural shift happened.
I mean I'm not arguing that all women are discouraged from STEM, and I agree attitudes are changing, which is a good thing.
I wouldn't say that the problem is solved and it doesn't happen anymore though. I provided one study above, feel free to look up more, there are plenty. Something like 80% of STEM jobs are still held by men, and obviously that's not totally a result of discouragement, but seems likely to me that part of it is.
Hi I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in engineering be denied opportunities for internships because the employer only wanted to hire pretty girls- a standard not extended to men.
I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in software engineering be discouraged from learning software engineering at the undergraduate level, often from TAs/Professors.
I can also point to other reported anecdotes, such as the big Riot Games article, several blogs/tweets confirming the article, the Uber NYT article, etc.
The literal quote 'unable to find employment' does not coincide with the quoted portion 'discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied'. Employment is one of the last opportunities that can be denied or discouraged towards women- we have a wealth of educational, internship, volunteering, etc. opportunities that can serve to winnow the pipeline of appropriate female candidates before discussing employment.
Note: I'm not arguing that this is universal to all women in the engineering field, merely providing some response to "I have never even heard of this phenomenon anecdotally".
I was once sitting on a plane wearing a shirt branded with a major tech company. The person next to me asked if I was a software engineer and I said yes. They excitedly started telling me about how they were doing all this work to groom their young son (age like 6) to go into tech. This person also had a similarly aged daughter and he was doing none of this for her.
Perhaps the son really did love this stuff and perhaps the daughter was given the opportunity to do other things. Perhaps this was a one-off coincidence. But my experience is littered with this stuff. It happened even to me. I've got two parents who were both software engineers and I was given toys as a child that were designed to develop technical skills and my sister wasn't.
The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias.
> They excitedly started telling me about how they were doing all this work to groom their young son (age like 6) to go into tech.
Does this actually work though? My whole life, I've been weakly encouraged, mainly by my parents, to study economics and/or law, and discouraged (weakly by my parents, and strongly by society and bullies) from being a geek / programmer / mathematician... But in the end, I picked the latter.
At an individual level it probably fails more often than it succeeds. But a small effect across a broad population can lead to real distribution differences.
> The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias
That's not really true. There is a lot of research showing that men and women have different interests and make different life choices, and that these choices impact career demographics. One of the most well-researched differences is that men tend to be more interested in "things", especially mechanical things, and women tend to be more interested in "people".
Here is a journal article from Frontiers in Psychology that investigates how these differences-in-interest impact STEM field participation: "All STEM fields are not created equal: People and things interests explain gender disparities across STEM fields" (1):
> In the current study, we investigated the gender differences in interests as an explanation for the differential distribution of women across sub-disciplines of STEM as well as the overall underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. (...) We found gender differences in interests to vary largely by STEM field, with the largest gender differences in interests favoring men observed in engineering disciplines (d = 0.83–1.21), and in contrast, gender differences in interests favoring women in social sciences and medical services (d = −0.33 and −0.40, respectively).
> Importantly, the gender composition (percentages of women) in STEM fields reflects these gender differences in interests. The patterns of gender differences in interests and the actual gender composition in STEM fields were explained by the people-orientation and things-orientation of work environments, and were not associated with the level of quantitative ability required. (...)
Some studies show that these things-vs-people differences begin to manifest extremely early in life, before humans could be influenced by social factors. One famous study of this phenomenon is "Sex differences in human neonatal social perception" (2):
> Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. The present study aimed to ascertain whether the sexual dimorphism is a result of biological or sociocultural differences between the two sexes. 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin.
It is also known that testosterone levels affect decision-making and career choices, and that women tend to be more financially risk-averse than men. Since men's testosterone levels tend to be much higher than women's, and since men are less risk-averse, that results in demographic differences. For an investigation of this, see the article "Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone" (3). For another study on sex and brain differences see (4). There is a lot of research out there exploring the differences between men and women, and how those differences play out in our lives.
Every person should be supported in choosing whatever career interests them, and should not be judged based on demographics. I'm not advocating for any kind of discrimination. I am just observing that even with total equality of opportunity, if there are biological trends in interest differences, then we will see differences in overall job demographics.
How does this explain for example, the following two points I will assert:
1. Software Engineering has become more social over time. The idea of the loner software developer has sort of vanished as open offices become the norm and the collaborative nature of software engineering grows.
2. Women majors in computer science has dropped like a rock over the past few decades [1]
These two points seem to refute your explanations, considering software development at one time had a signiciant amount of developers that were women. If women were somehow biologically uninclined to be software engineers, the statistics don't seem to follow this train of thought.
"inherent interests"?? Anecdotally...my two biggest passions are photography (artistic/visual creativity in general) and software development. Neither of these were innate. My grandma and my dad were the ones that exposed me to creativity and computers throughout my entire childhood, and then a boyfriend who sparked my interested in code.
If money and the like were of no concern I might consider pursuing photography over coding. However, just because I love that a little more, doesn't necessarily mean I'm not interested in code.
There are absolutely people who will pursue things they have little to no interest in, but there are also people who will pick one over another because one is just a little bit better for whatever reason. How about we don't discount that people can have multiple passions?
I edited my comment to replace "inherent interests" with "biological trends in interest differences".
I'm not trying to make a comment about individuals, only about trends that we might see in the population at large.
The topic further up was whether differences in job participation can be explained by reasons other than discrimination - the answer is that, yes, they can be explained by other factors such as biological trends in interest differences. One needs to control for these factors before drawing conclusions about discrimination.
That is interesting, I've only ever seen technology courses/opportunities targetting women/girls. Never anything like that for boys.
It doesn't matter to a boy in primary school what proportion of men there are in tech, they just want the opportunities others are getting. For some reason "other people wanted equality of opportunity in the past but didn't get it, so you can't have it now" is supposed to answer this.
Meanwhile noone seems to care that all the teachers, and all the elected governors, in the school are female; but if a lesson can't have only male scientists mentioned in it ... which seems massively inconsistent.
LEGO Mindstorms is the example that comes to mind most immediately to me. In addition to the toy there was an entire league structure that fed into a high school level robotics competition. Starting from a toy that was marketed clearly at boys. How many kids were first exposed to programming through Mindstorms? What percentage of those kids do you think were boys?
I'd truly encourage you to go hang out with some real activists working on this stuff. We do care about teachers being majority female (though things get much more male as you get to higher education as well as administration roles like principals).
All biases flow together. You are right that tech companies cannot stop this man from doing this. We must instead holistically approach these topics. But tech does play a role (via advertising and other media) in planting an image of what tech is like in people's minds, which can make them more or less likely to behave in this way.
The most important point here is that this stuff is everywhere and deep. When people say they've never seen any bias I encourage them to ask all their male peers if they used toys as children as an entry into tech. Then I ask if those toys were marketed at boys. Repeat for female peers. You find a lot of influence in this manner.
> This person also had a similarly aged daughter and he was doing none of this for her.
Anecdotal, but me and my dad tried so, so hard to get my sister into computers back in the 80s and 90s. Even just to use them, let alone program them. She had no interest. Absolutely zero.
She also had no interest in Legos, or Dungeons & Dragons, or video games, even though I tried to get her into them just so I could have another person to do these things with.
Ironically, she's now a successful project manager in her employer's IT department, managing software development projects.
I've observed the same thing. Personally, I've been pressured to hire less qualified women candidates to make the team more diverse. I've never been pressured not to hire a woman because she's a woman.
Just because women as a group have been disadvantaged, doesn't mean the women receiving this particular advantage deserve it more than other women, or other men.
There's nothing in this release saying they want to offer this to disadvantaged women, they simply want to offer it to women.
But you've said they have been disadvantaged as a group, so they are offering it to a disadvantaged group. I think you're saying they should be disadvantaged in a way besides their gender?
There is a difference between a disadvantaged person and a disadvantaged group. In my opinion that is the primary issue with prioritizing the needs of disadvantaged groups over the needs of disadvantaged individuals.
'disadvantaged women' in your phrase seems ambiguous.
From the lens of intersectionality, I could interpret 'disadvantaged women' to mean women who are also part of another marginalized group (e.g. trans women, women of color, women with disabilities, etc.)
But I could also read your comment as just asking them to be explicit and emphasize that they are making an offering for "women, a group of people at a disadvantage".
> On the other hand, a for-profit company deciding to offer free services to individual women, who may or may not be disadvantaged, simply because they're women, doesn't sit well with me either.
Because it’s a for profit organization it makes total sense for them. It has marginal cost but acts as huge marketing factor.
> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender.
I can tell you why. In part, it's explicit sexism and goal keeping from men, sure. But a far bigger reason there are less women in tech?
Step into any engineering course at a 4 year university. Come back and tell me how many women where in your class. Get the picture?
Of COURSE there are less women in engineering jobs. They are less women in engineering classes! So while there are definitely sexism problems, far BIGGER issues exist with reforming gender roles CULTURALLY.
Women should be encouraged from a young age to pursue science if it interests them. They should not be given artificial leg ups to help balance a problem which will never go away without addressing the root cause.
Is this actually true? How do we verify this? (Certain portions of engineering have higher women participation rates than men- can we identify a biological cause for this disparity, or that many of the sciences have women on parity or overrepresentation?)
I agree that this is a definite possibility but I struggle to identify a reason to explain the disparities of participation in subfields purely from a genetic point.
The basic answer is we don't know, hence why this is such a contentious issue. There are many known physical[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes[3]. Boys tend to play with inanimate objects while girls tend to play with dolls and role play. Women tend to be more social, while men are less so. Men with higher testosterone tend to be more aggressive overall[4]. Some think many of these differences are caused by society, while others think that it has to do with an entire chromosome being different, causing differences overall.
[3] These differences are based on population distributions, and there are plenty of outliers within those distributions, eg. masculine women, feminine men. I am speaking of averages here.
Intuitively, I don't understand why computer science engineering would have a lower ratio than engineering in general from a biological perspective. Or physics vs chemistry. Or structural engineering vs electrical. Which of the above fields have to do with playing with dolls vs playing with inanimate objects (are dolls not inanimate objects)? Which of the above fields is more aggressive in the academic pursuit? (I've never considered computer science, with a very low ratio compared to other STEM pursuits, to be more aggressive...)
That confusion is why I'm having a lot of difficulty personally buying that much of the differences can be attributed to biological differences in women and men. I feel like I'm missing some evidence where it is proven computer science is more aggressive than, say, structural engineering- and that's why there is a bigger representation of men in computer science.
The stack exchange has nothing to do with whay I'm getting at here, and I apologize if I've been unclear. Let me say for example, in a 2004 survey... "Women were also employed in higher rates than men in environmental engineering (9% to 4%) and chemical engineering (7% to 4%). However, they were less likely than men to be employed in mechanical engineering (8% to 17%) and electrical engineering (12% to 18%)". [0]
Does this mean that chemical engineering is less aggressive of a field than mechanical engineering? Or that computer science engineering is more aggressive of a field than environmental engineering? Or that chemical engineering is the engineering field with the most amount of doll-like objects being interacted with?
> Or that chemical engineering is the engineering field with the most amount of doll-like objects being interacted with?
Another reason might be “contact with people” variable. As a programmer I can work the whole day and not interact with anyone, and I like it. I never worked in chemistry or engineering, but if my high-school lessons are any indication, chemistry involves a lot more interactive lab work than say physics and math.
If it's the contact with people angle, has the proportion of women in computer science increased with the collaborative nature of computer programming? Open source initiatives? Can we track the number of meetups, conferences, with the population of women engineers? I'm legitimately curious.
You are trying to verify an innate property of a person by measuring the emergent outcome of their choices. While this is a good litmus test, I do not think the answer to quantifying this acclimation toward a certain profession is something that can be measured discretely.
This is exactly why I propose equal opportunity, not equal outcome.
Everyone should be free to pursue a profession that interests them, without artificial cultural hurdles like racism and sexism. At the same time however, we as society should not EXPECT that women (or men) will equilibrate over time. If there are differences, let them be. But ensure equal opportunity.
And the same could be said for other fields. Step in to a construction site/auto dealership/mechanic shop/sports field and tell me how many women you see. Are all those fields dominated by sexist men as well?
And for men, how many are nurses/teachers/social workers/counselors/human resources vs women? Are all those fields dominated by sexist women?
Could it be that women enjoy jobs with more human interaction and men are more content to sit in front of a computer screen?
It absolutely could be the case that men and women have differences that transcend culture, pushing them toward certain careers and interests. Totally possible.
Regardless of whether or not that is true, I believe we should all have the opportunity to pursue whatever interests us. Equal Opportunity. This does not mean we should expect Equal Outcome. Those are two entirely different things.
Programs like "Women: Learn to Program This Summer" are Equal Outcome programs. They provide unfair advantages to a certain subset of society, with the explicit intent of "evening the score". That's a dangerous game to play.
Do you think education is a female thing? Is that the message having 85% of primary teachers being female (100% in my kids UK school) gives to boys.
If your contention is correct, the absence of male teachers for impressionable young children must be a massively damaging thing? Much worse than a preponderance of one sex or another of students in a lecture theatre?
So "only whites may apply for this scholarship" is fine then?
Clearly not IMO, there needs to be a morally defensible reason for restricting the field by physical characteristics; sex and skin colour/race are not good reasons in general.
Underrepresented is a funny phrase, it's a job, not a debating chamber. There are less women in some sectors, less men in others. Provided boys and girls aren't being unnecessarily inhibited from any career options then I don't see a problem -- if we stop discriminating in unrelated characteristics then ratios of the sexes in particular roles will find an appropriate level. That level will not be 50:50 in any sector I'd warrant.
Think of it like this. Linear models in statistics break out the prediction for a given case in terms of main effects and interactions. All women get hit by the main effect of being a woman; it just so happens that some women are buoyed by other main effects like wealth, whiteness, etc.
Now, it may turn out that you might want to evaluate an aggregate measure of disadvantage per person, so you can sort people by level-of-disadvantage and apply that first. But that method may be brittle; if you choose the relative weighting of various forms of disadvantage wrong, then you're applying your benefit in a way that deviates from the "true" perfect-information order anyway.
One way of resolving this is to say "we're not going to attempt to apply this benefit in a perfectly Rawlsian order; we're just going to pick a main effect to attack and, while doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm.".
> doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm.
This thread, and past threads on this subject turn into an absolute shit-show and cause tribalism/division. I feel like that is evidence enough that these policies are harmful.
When you do/don't get a job there's uncertainty around the reason. Was it my experience/skill-set, or race/gender/sexual orientation/religion? It feels like we're trying to fix discrimination by forcing everyone to feel like they might be experiencing it.
It doesn't show that they're harmful; it shows that they have a cost. The question is whether the benefit exceeds the cost, which depends on making some sort of quantifiable conversion rate between "acrimony and uncertainty" versus "more women getting coding jobs".
> The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed.
Why should it be fixed? Is there any evidence to suggest it's because of discrimination? There's been special treatment for women (such as this one) for so long now. Have you ever considered that maybe women just don't want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end writing software?
Also, I walked past a building site the other day. Full of men. They work through the night for not much money. Where's all the special programs to get women in to back-breaking overnight construction work?
Isn't programming a skill that can be learned alone in a fairly straightforward manner? I mean, most programming languages have extensive documentation, tutorials and so on (at least FOSS dynamical languages like Python, Rust, Perl...). From my personal experience and what I can guess about hackers I've talked to for instance on IRC, that's how most guys learned it : the web is full of resources for whoever wants to learn.
Now, if for some reason women don't take this road and "need" someone to hold their hand in order to learn programming, I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources.
Not to mention that programming can be a tedious and lame job (sitting in front of a computer all day is often mentioned as a genuine nightmare), so if you have to do it, you'd better love it in the first place.
> Isn't programming a skill that can be learned alone in a fairly straightforward manner?
No?
Stuff like pointers, for loops, threads, interface design, data structures, idempotency, source control, working on a linux command line, etc. all present reasonably challenging roadblocks for a burgeoning developer, and I think many of us benefited from having someone around to help walk us through this the first time.
That's an interesting example. Sure, I was initiated to the Unix command line at the University, but it was just that : an initiation. I got hooked quickly though so I was driven to learn the rest all by myself (or rather, with the help of the linux community online). I'm sure it's more or less the same for most linux nerds. I may have bought one or two books about linux though, but buying a book about a subject you're passionate about is something normal.
You're right that once you want to get into the important technical details, free documentation on the web may be insufficient and you may need to invest in proper textbooks. I still think my point stands, though.
I was introduced to Linux in college and I thought, "Neat. Now please put me back into Visual Studio where the real coding happens." I was not hooked.
It wasn't until I used Linux professionally that I started to really respect (and enjoy) using the environment. And even then it wasn't until I saw another human using it efficiently. It's one thing to read about how useful it is, it's another thing to struggle with a problem and have someone show you how you could solve your exact problem.
Once I had that connection with another human/mentor, seeing my specific problem solved, that's what hooked me. I don't think I could have gotten there with toy/educational examples online/in books.
> I don't think I could have gotten there with toy/educational examples online/in books.
For programming, the available documentation is not just ludo-educational, it's also the official references, like the RFCs and specifications. There is literally no better source of knowledge for computer science. I haven't delved into technical specs very often in my life, but I have at times and I bet most good programmers do it often.
I didn't really start programming until I took an intro to programming class in university. I had been taught programming languages multiple times before, but that was the first time anyone explained the underlying systems the language was built upon. It was the first time I felt like I understood what I was doing.
A good instructor will also guide you to good learning materials. There's lots of terrible books out there, but I found good books through my classes. Though, it's probably easier to find learning materials today than when I began.
I learned programming on my own. Sure there is a lot to learn in programming. Often you are stuck with a problem for long and there is simply nobody, except online forums, to help you out. Nobody around me is into programming. I am married and have 2 kids. My regular job has nothing to do with programming. I have to spend 3 hours in daily commute. Saturdays are working day. But I still manage to learn programming.
I don't understand why women in general need special help or guidance.
> so if you have to do it, you'd better love it in the first place.
Depends on how much you think anything else sucks. Compared to physical labor you're not breaking your back over things.
Compared to other jobs you get paid relatively ok (EU centric view).
Compared to some jobs the hours aren't that crazy: hey McKinsey folk! How are you doing? :D
Really, it isn't that simple. It depends.
It helps if you like it, but a job is a job and if you can perform it, then why do you need to like it?
Moreover, did you ever read about the overjustification effect [0]? Long story short, if you like something, you might dislike it after you get paid for it.
Also, if you love programming you might be biased in always solving a problem in a technical way. You'd become that guy from the LEGO movie that always screams "SPACESHIP!" [2]
Full disclosure: I like programming and sometimes can force myself into loving it [1]. The consequences of loving programming: no social life, no normal diet, sleep rhythm is off. I'm basically just doing one thing as much as possible: programming.
[1] As a mettamage I have some control over my psyche and I can quite often, but not always, force myself to like or even love things that I initially hate ;-)
> Depends on how much you think anything else sucks. Compared to physical labor you're not breaking your back over things.
Not always true, sometimes you have to help lift boxes (100lb) carrying hardware with your software preinstalled / ready to be shipped because you work in a small office and paying someone off to do the same task 1 day randomly throughout the different quarters of the year is not worth the hassle.
Yeah, sometimes it gets physical. But I think they're talking about daily, continuous, physical labor that can be very destructive to your body in the long term.
The problem for many people isn't the lack of material.
It's the difficulty of keeping yourself motivated and do what you need to do. Making a commitment, such as joining a class or education, is massively helpful.
> I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources.
It may come as a shock but most people don't work with their ultimate passion. And often even if you start working with your passion you'll have to deal with the ugly sides and you might lose the passion. Sometimes a job is just a job.
It may come as a shock but most people don't work with their ultimate passion.
The problem is that people learning programming for the first time, who don't have a passion for it, can find themselves in a class with those who do. I have witnessed, first hand, people who were beginners getting left in the dust by their classmates on a group project and ultimately dropping out of CS/SE entirely.
The problem is experienced programmers being in the same class as beginners.
I think the problem is deeper than that, though. Computer science is a challenging field and programming is a discipline that benefits from a large amount of experience. Universities try to sell their CS programs as accessible to beginners yet tend to be very quiet about the extremely high dropout rates.
Look at it this way. How well would I do if I enrolled in a fine arts program? I would essentially be a total beginner at drawing and painting. My classmates would include people who have been drawing and painting more-or-less nonstop since they were young children. Is it reasonable for me to expect the same level of career success as these born artists?
There may be a lot of jobs out there for people with basic programming skills, just as there may be jobs doing mundane art and design. But I think it's a bit ridiculous for a total beginner to go into an exceptionally rigorous, programming-heavy, academic CS program and expect to do well. The fact that universities try to sell people on this is disappointing, to say the least.
>Now, if for some reason women don't take this road and "need" someone to hold their hand in order to learn programming, I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources.
Why would you assume that a programming course amounts to "hand holding" just because a single gender is involved?
For that matter, why would you assume the women taking this course are unmotivated?
If this exact same program allowed men and women, would you still be casting the same aspersions only on the women, or would you also be implying that trying to "force" the men to program is a waste of time and resources?
> would you still be casting the same aspersions only on the women,
Gender is not important here. As a matter of fact, I wanted to edit my post and talk about people in general, but I did not bother. This article was about women.
My point is that I have the feeling that programming is something most people learn more or less for free with the documentation available online and with the help of online programming communities. The lack of intrinsic motivation is how I explain someone (woman or man) may need financial support and a IRL teacher.
I think the optimal situation if you're applying to a program like this is to be a self-starter that's capable and interested in programming already, doing the same kind of self-learning that I did online without anyone asking my gender. Then if you happen to be a woman, you can go to one of these events, be the best in the class and treat it mostly as a networking opportunity.
I don't think having someone fund a class or taking "IRL" classes are signs of a lack of intrinsic motivation. Plenty of motivated people have taken student loans to get through CS courses in actual colleges.
Nevertheless, the classes being offered here appear to be online, through Lambda School[0].
I would appreciate some handholding when jumping into a new language or framework, so I don't have to waste countless hours in frustration, and I am a man.
I don't understand why handholding is bad and why it should be used as an argument against women coding. When men do it, it's called mentoring.
Coding as far as syntax and doing something like codeacademy... yes that is relatively straight forward. But programming like that is not really going to get you anywhere when making a web app for instance. Syntax and programming aside there is a whole stack of stuff you have to know. I did not realize this until bringing a friend to a meetup that was looking to get into software development. He was doing all the online courses and learning Python/JS. But then the rabbit hole of knowledge starts opening up where you realize it takes a whole lot more than that to do anything.
Oh that's easy just send a cURL request with header Accept: application/json ..... OK what's cURL, what's a header? So for us that have been in the game it is easier to "learn to code" another language as there are parallels everywhere and you have that baseline knowledge of how things generally work. Just try to explain something that you feel is "relatively straightforward" to a person not exposed to tech... I made the same mistake and thought it was straightforward, it is not as you are making many assumptions about knowledge. I am at the point where I am familiar with a lot of stuff and can Google things I don't know but what if you had no idea what even to search for? That is where instruction helps.
From my personal experience and what I can guess about hackers I've talked to for instance on IRC, that's how most guys learned it : the web is full of resources for whoever wants to learn.
I would love to learn to code. It's the reason I originally joined HN closing in on a decade ago. (Proof: my first post, the day I joined: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713015)
But I have found that one barrier to me getting anywhere is a lack of ability to ask questions and get meaningful answers. Men often have male friends that they can shoot the breeze with and casually mention some coding thing and get some kind of reply from one or more people.
And my experience is that men don't talk to me that way. I don't have any buddies I can shoot the breeze with who will go "Oh, yeah, that thing is a known issue and you need to do yadda." Men shooting the breeze with me are inevitably hitting on me, even if they are married.
I've been here a long time. People here mostly don't hit me up via private email and things like that to just chat about a thing. When I have explicitly said "You can email me to discuss that further." I never get emails to discuss that further. Instead, I get inquiries into when I next plan to vacation in their part of the world and suggestions that I would enjoy visiting their lovely country (and, hint, hint, they would love to have coffee with me should I happen to casually drop by their country on vacay, because that's clearly how desperately poor women who can't pay their damn bills spend their time, globe trotting to hook up with random internet strangers who apparently thought "Wow, a woman speaking to me. She must be looking for sex!").
I've occasionally had brief stints of being able to have casual conversations in a chat environment with a guy who happened to be an IT guy. I found it enormously, incredibly, mind-blowingly useful and valuable to get those casual comments of "Oh, are you doing X? Cuz, you know, X don't work. Did you think of yadda?" But most of the time, I simply don't have access to that kind of conversation.
Nearly a decade of hanging on HN has failed to magically give me such access. Anytime I comment on how frustrated I am about such things, I am inevitably pissed all over by people acting like I am making shit up -- because, yes, clearly, this is how you welcome women into the bro coders club, by pissing on them at every available opportunity.
I still would like to learn to code. I spend a lot of time online. I think men vastly underestimate how much support they have access to. A small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours and hours of time by pointing you in the right direction. As a woman, I mostly can't get access to those types of comments. Men are too busy trying to figure out how to ask for my phone number.
I really don't know how to adequately describe the ginormous Wall of China style deafening silence that faces me and that helps keep me poor, unable to figure out coding and a zillion other things that drive me crazy.
To be clear, I'm not posting this to just whine about my pathetic life. That's inevitably the interpretation most people make of such comments by me. It's frankly just another means to shut me out, dismiss me and invalidate my points.
I'm posting it to try to elucidate the fact that guys have more access to support than they seem to appreciate. I can't join a chat or slack channel and count on getting help because I posted a question. I can count on being dismissed, sexually harassed and treated like an unwelcome intruder.
And that's a giant barrier that men mostly don't seem to face. Men can talk to other men casually and get loads of useful information that is simply not accessible to me. If it were, I think I would already be a coder with sev...
> Men can talk to other men casually and get loads of useful information that is simply not accessible to me.
That is just hard to understand. If your gender is an issue, why even make it public in the first place? I mean, ever heard of the saying "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." ?
> She can't do that and at the same time complain about being treated as a woman.
She's not complaining about "being treated as a woman"; she is specifically complaining about this:
> "I can't join a chat or slack channel and count on getting help because I posted a question. I can count on being dismissed, sexually harassed and treated like an unwelcome intruder."
I don't think people should have to hide their identity in order to be able to discuss tech with their peers without harassment or being dismissed.
I have the conversations you say do not happen with female developers and engineers every single day, online and offline. I've mentored and developed male and female engineers and technicians for decades, without any discrimination, harassment, or asking for their phone numbers.
I don't care one whit about what gender an engineer or technician is, nor do I even know all the time online -- sometimes I find out years later, sometimes I never find out, but I've never cared.
If you want to learn to code, join one of the free Udacity courses, or MIT or Harvard's free EdX courses, and learn, and write your projects. Nobody's going to stop you. Information is free. And you got a whole stack of useful responses to the post you just linked.
At the risk of simplifying your problem, what's stopping you from just not announcing your gender at all on these forums or chatrooms? Why make your username your full name at all? I've been joenot443 for as long as I can remember, and when given the option, I never volunteer my gender because I just don't think it's usually useful for that discussion.
Your question is a "gotcha" question. It's dismissive and acts like the occasional exception proves the problem doesn't exist. It's also unrelated to the things I'm complaining about.
But here are a few observations about that post:
The HN account in question has under 300 karma. There are three posts, all about the book this person is writing. All comments by the account are in replies to those posts. The account has made zero effort to participate generally in discussion here.
She's not trying to network. She's developing a single project and getting public feedback.
Here are a few other observations for you:
Between my original handle and this one, I have more than 40K karma. My previous handle was briefly on the leaderboard. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard.
I've just looked. I think I can confidently determine the full names of twelve of the top fifteen members of the HN leaderboard quite readily, with minimal effort. Many of them use their name or some portion of it as their handle or some portion of it. (First name, last initial; first initial, last name; etc.)
Yet I am routinely told that I should hide my gender online to avoid problems.
Here is a post I made in January that I wrote and self-posted. It got substantial karma and substantial comments and 60K+ page views total (about 55k the first couple of days):
It got one and exactly one private email from someone potentially professionally meaningful to me. I replied to that email. They did not reply to my reply. So I don't know how useful that is for networking purposes.
It made zero money, though it had a Patreon link and a PayPal link at the time. I spent about two weeks developing that piece.
People on HN use adblockers more aggressively than normal and ads generally are doing pretty poorly these days. All of HN expects quality writing on the front page, all day, every day. They decry pay walls and will post workarounds for pay walls.
Regular journalism sites are struggling and dying. They can't figure out how to pay their bills.
HN generally trends towards well-heeled male programmers, lawyers and other respected professionals. Yet they don't want to support writers. I am routinely told "get a real job" by people here.
There is no method by which the HN audience is willing to pay for content. Not by patronage, not by subscriptions, not by tip jars and certainly not by ads. The expectation that people post good content and make it freely available to the general public kind of worked when you could make money via ads. But ad payments have dropped across the board by 75 percent or more online for most sites that I know of.
I mean, I could just go on and on, but it's pointless because you aren't here to understand the problem space. You are here to post a single link as a "gotcha" that proves in your mind that there is no sexism on HN.
If there is no sexism on HN, why do I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of 100 names?
(Please note that a lot more than 100 people have spent time on it. As far as I can tell, that means that not even 1 percent of the members who have spent time there post as openly female. Please note the qualifier there of openly female. I am aware that it is possible that someone has made the leaderboard while hiding the fact that they are female.)
Anyway, this argument is incredibly tiresome and I think I need to try to go do other things. More people piling on to try to somehow dismiss me is not some kind of good faith engagement by any stretch of the imagination.
> I really don't know how to adequately describe the ginormous Wall of China style deafening silence that faces me and that helps keep me poor, unable to figure out coding and a zillion other things that drive me crazy.
I genuinely do wish you success. But I've been complicit in this wall of silence for a long time, and I make no apologies for that. Your comment history suggests that any good faith attempt to engage with you will most likely be futile.
You preemptively dismiss anyone who doesn't pander to your claims of sexism and class-ism. A minor disagreement about even the most banal of topics can lead to accusations of "pissing" or "crapping" all over you. Your constant Gish gallop of grievances makes it difficult to focus on any one of them for long enough to make any constructive difference.
I wish I could be of some help, but I'm pretty certain that any good advice will continue to go unheeded. Until that changes, I can only say: Best wishes to you.
Your comment history suggests that any good faith attempt to engage with you will most likely be futile.
It would be nice if more people would make an effort to engage me in good faith rather than blame me for my lack of traction.
I'm quite confident that I have gotten whatever traction I do have due to being very reasonable in the face of a mountain of crazy-making BS.
It winds up being a damned if I do, damned if I don't situation.
For the record, in response to my comments here today, someone emailed me privately to offer an hour of their time this weekend to discuss my desire to learn to code. Hopefully that's a sign of better things to come.
I'm noting it to say there are, in fact, options beyond refusing to engage me or blaming me (or other women, people of color, etc). I'm stating it for the benefit of anyone wondering what they can do about such issues.
I'm very well aware that it's difficult to engage someone who is angry and complaining. But not pointing out the barriers to participation also doesn't foment change.
I wish it worked to just show up and participate as if my gender was irrelevant. But the truth is I did that initially and the result was souch push back, I went digging to figure out why. And that's the reason I know I'm "prominent" for a woman here. Because I was making waves and it was coming back to bite me at a time when I was nowhere near having enough karma for the leaderboard.
I would love to have zero reason to bitch about sexism on HN. It was never anything I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to participate in conversation and learn to code and further my projects, just like the guys here do. And that proved impossible.
I'm a guy and no, I don't have more access to support. And I never had. I've self learned programming with very little help, mostly books and internet. Then at 18 I've found my first job as a programmer.
> small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours
Sometimes it can. But if you're just a beginner, you don't need the expert advice you're talking about. Hours and hours of what? If you're already programming even at very entry level, you can get very similar advice on stackoverflow.
> If it were, I think I would already be a coder with several published projects.
I don't think you lack expert advice. I think you lack interest.
I remember since pre-teen, I was obsessed about computers, first videogames, then computers in general. I've spent hundreds of hours tinkering with them, trying to make them do what I wanted them to. I wasn't motivated by money, it was fun.
Vast majority of exceptionally good programmers I know can tell similar stories about themselves. There're a few women among them, too.
When you have interest that strong, you spend hundreds of hours of your time, unpaid, doing what you like. Especially when you're a teen with no kids. That's what helps with learning programming. Also reading good books. Expert advice only becomes relevant much later, and by that time, if you pick jobs well, you'll be surrounded with smart people willing to answer your questions.
If you don't have that kind of interest in computers, you won't become exceptionally good. You probably can still learn the trade and make a living off it, but will require substantial time and efforts. I think that's the target audience of that summer school.
I wouldn't equivocate or dismiss classes as "hand holding" - social resources are very important for many people looking to learn a skill. The internet is a messy place and it is difficult to find the correct information without experience. A teacher in this sense acts a curator of information, giving students enough knowledge that they know where to go to learn more, as well as structuring the knowledge in a way that allows the students to learn in the best way possible. Even things as simple as "Check Stack Overflow" isn't a piece of knowledge to take for granted. Also, many people learn best when they can be in a group of other people learning the same thing. This has the additional benefit of developing social relationships.
To your second point, not all software jobs are as solitary and asocial as you seem to believe. Pairing, project planning, application product design, are all things that are done with other people. In fact, I am a software engineer and have more than a few days at work where I don't even touch my computer, yet still get a lot of work done.
The archetype of the solitary, 100% self-learned hacker as a representative of all, or even most of tech workers has been outgrown by the industry. Even the use of the term "hand-holding" as I've seen it used is a gatekeeper mentality IMO that needs to stop, or at least be toned back significantly. People that don't pull their weight certainly exist, but everyone learns and contributes in their own way.
EDIT: To clarify that the money is going directly to private individuals, as per Austen.
Incredible, thanks for putting your money where your values are @jl.
As for the numerous comments in this post around reverse sexism / reverse discrimination:
1. This is a private individual giving personal capital to other private individuals, supporting a personal cause. It is hard to both claim principles of free market and rally against this.
2. Private companies making hiring decisions are correcting for an indefinite history of bias. That doesn't mean they're hiring unqualified individuals, simply that they're making sure they put in measure to correct for biases and can identify individuals with the great qualifications that in the past would have been past up due to arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'.
3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.
1. Free market doesn't mean that your choices are exempt from criticism. I was going to say silly but honestly this is a very stupid point. "To people who are criticising me for funding ISIS - FREE MARKET".
I'd like to think HN is a place where people can have debate without resorting to saying things like "very stupid point" ;)
You're absolutely right that free market doesn't mean your choices are exempt from criticism. That isn't my point, nor where I applied 'Free Market'.
My point was: If you're going to argue against this donation, saying that it fuels the trend of reverse racism / sexism that makes the free market more distorted, I would argue that this donation is very much a part of the free market. Private donations to private organizations for private causes.
Yeah I comment a lot and pretty much never insult people. No-one is arguing that this is wrong because it's a government market distortion, they're arguing against it because it's injust, and proceeding from incorrect principles. So you invented an argument that's invalid by it's own definition as a straw man to rebut. It's stupid, there's no other word for it.
> My point was: If you're going to argue against this donation, saying that it fuels the trend of reverse racism / sexism that makes the free market more distorted, I would argue that this donation is very much a part of the free market. Private donations to private organizations for private causes.
This is trying to eat your cake and still have it though.
If you ask a staunch free market person whether we should have laws restricting private activity or freedom of association, they say no. If you want to have a private organization and only invite women or only invite men then have at it.
But if you're going to have a law against that, over their objection, then it should at least be enforced consistently against everyone.
Objecting to the lack of consistency is different than objecting to the original principle.
Can you help me understand it better? Are you saying that it is currently against the law for @jl to donate to Lambda School to sponsor 40 men to attend for free? I don't think that is your point, but I'm having trouble interpreting it any other way.
I'm not going to pretend to know the specific details of every law in every jurisdiction regarding what organizational purpose or member threshold or funding source or the like is required before sex discrimination is unlawful, but I'm fairly confident there are a number of laws to that effect on the books.
Maybe none of them apply in this case. But given the complexity and somewhat arbitrary nature of the requirements, that seems more like happenstance than some reasoned choice to have this specific type of thing excluded as opposed to the others, and we probably ought to be more consistent one way or the other.
For example, if MIT (a private university) wanted to have a program like this, should it be allowed in this case but not in their case just because their institution does some unrelated publicly funded research or whatever the restriction is?
But then you're also opening them up to being an entirely or almost-entirely gender segregated school if they want to be. So which one is it?
Obviously I now can’t prove it as I didn’t take a screenshot, but when I wrote my reply their comment specifically used the word “overcorrecting”. Clearly, they have edited their comment.
I would understand reverse sexism to mean consciously giving preferential treatment to women, all other things being equal (because sexism, bizarrly, means discrimination against women, not just discrimination based on sex/gender). But, of course many versed in feminist theory would disagree with such definition.
Sexism and racism in favor of a group which is usually hurt by sexism or racism. Or equivalently, sexism and racism against a group which usually benefits from sexism and racism.
> arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'.
You make it sound like there are people out there saying to themselves, "I know I should stop discriminating against under-represented minorities, but I just can't seem to stop myself" as if discriminating were addictive like smoking. If somebody used to discriminate and wants to stop, the solution is to stop discriminating, not discriminate in the other direction. But this isn't somebody who used to reject people under vague euphemisms and needs this "nicotine patch" to help them kick the habit - this is somebody who's creating new euphemisms to discriminate in a way that's socially acceptable.
Unconscious bias is a real thing. You can easily have a situation in which no one is intentionally discriminating and yet end up with decidedly non-equal outcomes.
One of my favorite examples from the Boston Symphony Orchestra[1]:
> For the auditions, the musicians would be playing behind a screen, in an effort to remove all chance of bias and allow for a merit based selection only - a selection that would hopefully increase the number of women in the orchestra.
> To their surprise, their initial audition results still skewed male.
> Then they asked the musicians to take off their shoes. The reason? The sound of the women's heels as they entered the audition unknowingly influenced the adjudicators. Once the musicians removed their shoes, almost 50% of the women made it past the first audition.
>> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round. The impact for all rounds [columns (5) and (6)] is about 1 percentage point, although the standard errors are large and thus the effect is not statistically significant.
> So, in conclusion, this study presents no statistically significant evidence that blind auditions increase the chances of female applicants. In my reading, the unadjusted results seem to weakly indicate the opposite, that male applicants have a slightly increased chance in blind auditions; but this advantage disappears with controls.
Would you stop please stop posting unsubstantive comments and ideological flamebait to HN? Your comments in this thread have been well below the standard HN users are asked to stick to, and even well below the median comment in this pretty bad thread.
I doubt it. You don't like what I say so you apply the strictest standard while OP is clearly ideological but yet, magically, not flagged or so very helpfully nitpicked on style.
That's not exactly what OP means. What's actually going on is that we have certain expectations around candidates' behavior and the wording they use on their resumes and the way that they respond to technical interviews. These are behaviors that are ingrained for most white men but tend to be less ingrained for women and non-white men. So our hiring processes are subtly biased against anyone who isn't like us.
The interview process is all about being biased against certain candidates. But what often happens is that the biases we hold when interviewing and working with candidates don't matter to the job but happen to exclude people who would otherwise do quite well.
It's not like interviewers are all twirling their waxed mustaches and snickering about how many women they've excluded. But what they do is listen to how someone describes a problem or how they behave during a whiteboard interview and interpret that negatively simply because it's different from what they were expecting. And so they don't hire the person because they're a "bad culture fit." Some women have been trained by our culture to use less assertive terms to avoid showing dominance in a discussion. And they tend to wait for you to finish before they talk.
Or suppose that the people at the company tend to wear a certain gamut of colors because they're all white and blue-ish and grey-ish colors tend to look better on white guys. So when someone shows up with a redder shirt that person might be taken as "too flamboyant" when in reality they're just picking a good neutral color for their skin tone. It just happens to be a significantly different tone from the rest of the office.
It could even be as subtle as discomfort with inexact or flowery speech. I had a lead who would get very uncomfortable when I would talk in metaphor and use metaphors and different words to describe things in terms that he wasn't used to. He would try to get me to tone it down. But everyone else on the team was perfectly okay with it so I kept doing it. That's another form of useless bias, because I was understood and could do my job but probably wouldn't have been as hire-able if I had talked like that during my interview.
My point and OP's point is that discrimination is frequently not overt. We have to look past these superficial differences and really think about whether someone can do the job. And we also need to be exposed to more candidates who are not like this. So a program like this stuffs the pipeline and gets us more exposure, and it's now up to us to challenge our existing biases and try a more diverse array of people out.
It's not quite true to say tech startups are made up of predominantly white men, but also men of East Asian and Indian descent. So you can't just use "white men" as a euphemism for the dominant culture of tech start ups.
Journalists do it all the time so you obviously can[1]. Google is less white than the US is and journalists talk about their diversity problem. The definition of white is shifting as has been obvious for decades[2]. Asians are white when convenient and not when not.
If you ever make it out to the bay, you’ll see that white men, Asian men, and, to a much lesser extent (though much more represented than everyone other than the first two), Asian women make up the majority of the engineering workforce here.
Which clearly demonstrates that just because you belong to a minority, it does not mean you will be "oppressed" or whatever the current narrative is. There are successful groups of people belonging to a minority, i.e. it is not the fact of belonging to a minority that is the problem, is it?
What consists of a minority is of course contingent and relative. A group that is a minority in one setting can be the majority in another. In one situation a group can be the oppressed, in another 'they' (different individuals but of the same 'group') can be the oppressors. Unfortunately that's human nature, but it doesn't mean we have to just sit back and accept it.
If course it's also possible to overcome obstacles like these. Some people are very successful at doing so, but unfortunately others are not and shouldn't really have to.
Look, I get it, people turn you down for jobs all the time. I am a white male, and I HATE looking for a job in my non-mainstream market, because I am constantly passed over for being a generalist/introvert/socially awkward/you-name-my-worst-social-traits-and-recruiters-and-hiring-staff-hate-it. When I get my foot in the actual door, my bosses always LOVE my work.
If I wasn't a, you know, a non-protected demographic, I could just hop on the internet and whine about how these strangers are discriminating against me for my [protected status] and that we need to fix years of bias, when it's really that they binned my resume for being too weird, too non-specialized, too X for their tastes.
The basic problem here is that there are too many confounders in why a particular individual is denied a particular position, and it's way too easy to cry "X-ism!" instead of actually breaking down the hiring process into actionable feedback for everyone.
Rarely are people deliberately discriminating. Instead they have erected systems that, for one reason or another, lead to biases. You cannot stop discriminating while continuing to use these systems.
Not so much these days, but back in the day I came across plenty of very explicit, very deliberate gender and racial bias. Talking to my mother, her whole career as a teacher was shaped by it.
The way I see it, there is very clear gender and racial and other minority under-representation in some areas of tech and employment. Some of the reasons for that might be benign, others might not. It makes sense to me to poke at this problem and explore it and push against it's boundaries, obviously in a non-damaging way.
This seems to me to be a positive way to do this. If women going to coding camps typically find themselves in a small minority among a big room full of guys, that isn't necessarily ideal for them. It's not anybody's fault, it's not like anybody has done anything wrong, but it can be an obstacle for those women to overcome. So why not try to minimise that obstacle?
>3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.
I think you summed up perfectly what causes people to have knee-jerk reactions against correcting biases.
Just because one effort doesn't address all issues at once, doesn't mean its futile.
Progress isn't instantaneous. It takes many attempts over long periods of time to move the needle. I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize any and all attempts at doing so.
Isn't it obvious? Poor people. The politically favored are women but by opening this to all women you only help women who are already privileged not poor women living in ghettos or from other poor backgrounds
There are so many initiatives out there supporting poor people. True, this one does not. But it seems a bit far-fetched to conclude from this one example that the poor are not supported at all.
Only 4% of Stanford students come from the bottom 20% of family incomes, while 66% come from the top 20%. That's 15 times as many students from wealthy families as poor families.[1]
The numbers are similar at other top schools, and feed into everything beyond, including startups.
I'm not sure how Stanford's economic disparity supports that there are no programs to assist people who are economically disadvantaged. Harvard, Stanford, and Yale offer free tuition for students with family income below 65,000 a year, Princeton for below 54,000, and Cornell, Brown, Columbia and Duke for families with income below 60,000.
There's no data in the article about the income level of the students applying. Are there 15 times as many wealthy applicants? Disparity is often contextualized in terms of systems of oppression and discrimination. Individual behavior, influenced by the effect being poor has psychologically, is likely to contribute to the difference in economic diversity.
I also see balancing out the disadvantages of children, teenagers, and young adults from poor families as way more important than balancing out the disadvantages of well-off women. I totally agree that we have a long road ahead of us in this respect, as the Stanford numbers clearly show.
Still, your claim that nobody cares about the poor is not justified. Also, there are many just causes, and we can work on all of them in parallel.
I didn't make the claim that nobody cares about the poor, that was a response to my comment and I added some relevant information.
The groups I was talking about, the ones that "nobody cares about" might not come to mind immediately, precisely because one rarely hears about them, but there are so many examples of disadvantaged people who are never the beneficiaries of such efforts.
For example: numerous physical traits other than sex or skin color. Invisible minorities like eastern Europeans or middle eastern Christians. People who grew up in rural areas.
It's probably absurd to expect to define categories and provide special help to every group that could be defined. Instead, people should be judged as individuals, each of whom has faced a variety of obstacles and benefited from a variety of privileges, and whose potential can only be evaluated by considering the whole person, not a few checkboxes.
I’m not sure I follow or maybe you have a step in your head that I can’t see.
@jl is literally giving money for living expenses for women to do this program. How does that help a rich or middle class woman more than a poor woman interested in the program? If anything, I’d expect the impact of $9K to be far greater for the last than the first (and presumably able to be treated as a tax-free gift or even if not, taxed at a low rate). If that’s the case, it seems more enabling, not less.
Providing money to attend this kind of program is awesome, but there are many people who, despite having expenses paid, still could not afford to take advantage of this kind of program. The more financially stable you are, the more likely you would be able to drop your life for x weeks to take advantage of this kind of program.
Its not that what she is doing is "helping rich people more", but it will still favour them.
This is an excellent comment. As it stands only the already privileged will be accepted into the program which I find to be disgusting. At least the financial status of applicants should be taken into account.
As to #2, is it bias when the candidate pool is self-selecting? I mean, generally we're talking about an industry where a self-starter can learn, get their foot in the door and build a career. Every actual study I've seen actually indicates bias in favor of women. The fact that the candidate pool is so unbalanced to me seems to indicate an issue in education or no issue at all (self-selecting), not corporate hiring.
But not everybody is a self starter. We also have a ton of people who were nudged in this direction and men get those nudges far more often. I certainly didn't learn software totally independent of other structures. Both my parents were software engineers. I had toys (marketed at boys) that encouraged creativity with computers. I had teachers who encouraged me to work in software. Etc etc.
But those nudges are LONG before the hiring process, which as I mention seems to be biased in favor of women in the field. Education and other bits take a different approach.
Media changes:
* Don't show techs/ops and programmers as interchangeable in practice
* Don't make techs or programmers look uncool
* Show more diverse techs and programmers in roles
* Don't dumb down smart female characters (some seasons of Arrow)
* Don't turn smart female tech characters out of tech (Daisy on Agents of Shield)
Education Changes:
I'm not sure here, between K-12 vs >12, as I really think better normalization in media would go a long way. I also think actual gaming with broader appeal is helping a lot too.
I do find it interesting that given college women outnumber men by almost 2:1 that the majority of STEM and more specifically CS graduates are men. I think that colleges really need to look at their own practices here more and that cuts both ways. I find a lot of modern progressive feminist extremism to be far different than any classic goal of equal opportunity which is disenfranchising.
A bit more on operations, management, development and deeper technology. I think a clearer understanding of the different roles that people play in development of technology systems is important. Men and women typically have different personality leanings (that broadly overlap), and understanding different roles and their focus would allow for people to understand and better choose towards their own interests.
In media, a lot of the time all the roles in IT/Development are interchangeable and muddled and there's almost no insight into where one role might end and another might begin.
> Private companies making hiring decisions are correcting for an indefinite history of bias. That doesn't mean they're hiring unqualified individuals, simply that they're making sure they put in measure to correct for biases and can identify individuals with the great qualifications that in the past would have been past up due to arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'.
Perhaps at some companies but not at mine. We do deny employment on the basis of sex and race, in order to increase percentages of women and URM. It's not just including women and URM that would otherwise be left out. It's also about making that a significant chunk of qualified white and Asian males don't get offers.
Makes me think of Eleanor Roosevelt. She started by focusing on a group. But there were a lot of problems in her times and she recognized that, and she went on to tackle so many things like anti-poverty and unemployed youth.
I wonder if Jessica Livingston will do something similar, since it's written in the FAQ: "Since neither I nor Lambda School have tried this before, I wanted to reduce the number of variables. If it works this summer, we may expand it next summer."
> We use inclusive definitions of “women” and “female” and welcome trans women, ...
Cool!
> ...genderqueer women...
I'm not sure what that means, but...
> ...and non-binary people who are female-identified.
Okay, what? Isn't the point of non-binary to not to be in the binary of man/woman? Can I identify as male, female and non-binary? Female and non-binary or male and non-binary? Male, female, female and non-binary?
The first programming task for these students should be designing the UI widget that appropriately records the "gender preference" of a user in 2019.
I'm leaning back and watching our profession go to shit. The liberalization of programming is very profitable for software companies. The wages need to go way down as currently we're the contemporary blue-collar job that didn't get screwed up by the modern corporate machine. This has less to do with gender than with plain-old creating inflation within the profession.
Accountants, doctors, lawyers, all managed to closely guard their profession while we're opening up the doors to basically everyone and we think 'it's cute' when the janitor learns how to write web pages. People saluting this should check back in about 10 years to let me know how it goes.
Sure, whenever someone comes up with initiative to encourage women to do anything, inevitably people start crawling out saying everything is going to be screwed up because of that.
Not be cause of women, of course, that would be a misogynist thing to say, but because of some completely unrelated and irrelevant reason.
Algorithmic thinking is part of math, and quite important.
Anyone who learns pencil-and-paper addition and multiplication is actually following an algorithm, so you basically cannot even learn arithmetic without touching algorithms.
People need to understand what an algorithm is, because more and more circumstances which affect their lives will be determined by algorithms.
I'm reminded of a Bloom County strip where Steve Dallas, the town lawyer, is bemoaning his lack of clients. "What this town needs", he says, "is two lawyers".
More engineers means more widgets and platforms and shims and other NIH, so I am not worried about the sort of thing you describe.
> 'it's cute' when the janitor learns how to write web pages
All that matters is the quality of that web page. This is no different from the janitor also being a novelist or accomplished musician.
I wouldn't worry if I were you; most people will only ever learn enough to program themselves into a corner they can't get out of in a small number of lines of code, in some scatter-brained scripting language for imbeciles.
The problem is that American citizen males perceived to be "white" have been making a good living via programming, even those who are not graduates of elite schools.
In the 1990s there were many complaints about a "right wing" culture based in the "computer science departments" of universities. This wasn't true, unless "right wing" means "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" and "critical of political correctness" but these attitudes are considered "far right wing" today. But compared to the rest of academia, computer science specifically, and STEM in general, were not as far-left as all other academic disciplines.
So, in order to diminish the economic prospects (and reproductive fitness) of American citizen so-called "white" males they encouraged affirmative action for non-white males, mass immigration of non-whites and visa programs like H1-B.
Then various so-called "white" male cultures in technology were demonized as "toxic," "sexist" and "racist" in order to further diminish their economic prospects.
This campaign has seen the cooperation of the economic elites and the "social left" - many who still pay lip service to various Marxist ideologies - to destroy the economic and social power of working and middle class American citizen "whites."
Google.com is the perfect example of this but it's endemic in Silicon Valley since the defense industry became less powerful there.
This campaign is written about quite openly, in rather explicit anti-"white male" terms, across media and academia. It's barely allowed to be criticized even on sites like this.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity that is the reason HN exists. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'd be happy to, if you give me a reason to believe that this is a good faith question and not a hostile cross-examination. That game is no fun, and only leads to more hostile cross-examination—exponentially more, in fact, as each entry produces multiple replies. It is also a bad thing for HN, soaking up time that could otherwise go into making HN better.
(The short version, though, is that (a) turning this into a race war about white men is obviously off topic, and (b) when people comment like this, they're essentially copying pre-existing talking points, which is neither thoughtful nor conversation.)
Yikes! nah.. I wouldn't take it that far. This is basically a profession with a very high entry barrier and consequently large compensation slowly becoming a commodity. That was my point. No idea about all the right-wing/left-wing stuff you're talking about.
This is an excellent thing! More women should be encouraged to code as there are too many men in the field already. I hope this sets the trend so that colleges mandate 60% quota for women in CS.
Companies should pay women more then men to encourage more women to join the field. Laws should be made so that companies have to hire women because the bosses are misogynist.
Ok, since it seems you don't want to use HN as intended, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
All: there's room on HN for good-faith debate, but not for ideological flamebait (regardless of which flavor), so can you please not post that? It's tedious, off topic, and boy does it suck the oxygen out of a thread.
Here's a test: ask yourself how much intellectual curiosity there is in your comment or your motivation for posting. If you don't find much, please hold off until you do. Intellectual curiosity is the reason this site exists [1], and it's a fragile factor nowadays amid the rage and hysteria online. Keep HN curious.
It's true that moderation comments are out-of-band for the site. But they're necessary, because the system can't right itself without them. If it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than they are to read.
Edit: mlevental points out that you were referring to the article, not my comment. I think there's plenty of intellectual curiosity in what Jessica wrote, especially in the blog post explaining why she did it. In fact, I'd say it's obvious. That commenters don't always respond to curiosity with curiosity of their own is a separate issue.
Certainly it's also a promotional post in the sense of wanting to call attention to the program, but that sort of mix is common on HN, and it's where it is on the front page because users upvoted it.
the person you're responding to here is trying to point out that the article is disingenuous and so only can generate the same. I don't agree/disagree. just clarifying.
The linked webpage does not spark my curiosity, it inflames me because I'm against any type of discrimination. Discrimination against men is sex based discrimination.
The webpage naturally attracts political and ideological flame bait and these kind of links should have no place on HN.
Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work not just in our industry but in society as a whole.
How can we simultaneously be an industry built on free an open source software and yet try to put up walls around our industry when efforts are made to make it more accessible to others?
The barriers to programming are being lowered and this is an excellent thing. More diverse companies, different types of people to bounce ideas on, new perspectives. This is what our industry needs more than ever, and yet so many feel a threat veiled by concerns of affirmative action and 'reverse discrimination'.
We need to acknowledge the barriers that have existed in our industry but may be blind to you personally because you never had to deal with it. For one, access to a PC for a long time was restricted to those with low incomes. My mother saved her income tax refund for two years to buy our first PC, the one I learned to program on. The schools I attended didn't have a computer lab until my junior year of high school. It's a great thing that programming is being spread to those who did not have access before. If software is eating the world everyone had better become familiar.
> Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work
All the top comments I see are supportive and encouraging. Maybe there were some negative removed comments, but overall this thread doesn't seem to demonstrate gatekeeping and discrimination.
This, I feel, is a disingenuous summary of the concerns with explicitly discriminatory policies voiced in the comments here. The issue is not that people don't want to make coding more accessible. The issue most serm to be taking is that many places are pursuing diversity by deliberately making it less accessible for undesireable demographics. See my company's policies for one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464944
I don't take any issue with boot camps that are exclusive to women, but I can definitely see how people are worried that it reinforces the general atttide that "white/Asian men in tech = bad, women & URM in tech = good"
Barriers aren't just being lowered. The're also being erected for some types of people.
That's a very abstract and dismissive take. Having a job isn't a "privileged position" and deciding who gets to be employed based on race and gender is more than "rebalancing scales". It's discrimination and people who have their life and family on the line aren't going to just smile and take one for the team while people push for them to be unemployed.
Parent linked to their policy, which contains this:
"1. We only accept applicstions from candidate from non-traditional backgrounds if they're diverse. Diverse is defined as any of the following: women, black, Hispanic, or native American - maybe also veterans but I'm not sure. Non-traditional background means coming from a coding boot camp, or majoring in a non-computing related field. I think after 3 years industry experience candidates are considered traditional even if they came from one of those two.*"
Note that this isn't impacting those well represented in tech; a white or asian man from a middle or higher class background.
It is instead rebalancing the priorities of those lacking in representation. A white guy who had to drop out of school to take care of his family? Not interested. Asian woman who decided her previous field wasn't for her, and does a coding bootcamp? Come on in for your interview.
I'm not saying I have an answer, but this is a legitimate concern. Responding with a generic platitude about how OP is merely feeling the effects of losing relative privilege is I think quite belittling and inappropriate.
Over 35% of my company's tech hires we're women in Q1, as compared to an industry representation of 20%. 39% of new grad hires we're women when tech grads were about 20% women. When women join the company they received additional mentorship and leadership opportunities that are exclusive to women. They are also promoted at higher rates than men (albeit slightly). This is in addition to the explicitly discriminatory hiring policies I detailed elsewhere in this thread.
What about this situation makes you think that white and Asian men are privileged as compared to women?
The assumption that women are underprivileged in tech often does not hold up to scrutiny. Many studies have found significant bias in favor of women. When Google studies it's wages recently it found proportionally more men were underpaid.
Again in case you missed it, my company does explicitly deny employment opportunities to white and Asian men where they would have been hired were they women: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464944
Barriers are going up. Perhaps at the moment this is limited to certain places like San Francisco and silicon valley. But to say barriers aren't going up for white and Asian men is counterfactual.
And besides, I'm Cuban myself so I ostensibly belong to an "underprivileged" group (though I would be among the first to tell you that this is a BS generalization. I am not by any means underprivileged).
When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
> Are women not as smart as men when it comes to tech?
I wouldn't say smart because thats a whole other can of worms but generally less suited, yes absolutely no doubt about it. It's weird but outside of the SV-buzzfeed-vice-huffpost filter bubble it's common knowledge that most women would rather do anything else besides stare at a screen all day and do something that neither involves people or art in any way.
It's not exactly rocket science but somehow it has become verboten to point out what everyone across cultures around the world (ex US progressives) and even science can clearly see.
I will say that in the past what I mentioned has been abused to keep out and belittle women who clearly WERE suited to jobs like this. The excellent movie Hidden Figures shows how wrong and sad that is.
But two wrongs don't make a right. Focusing on gender parity is also going to make for lot of miserable women pressured into careers that don't really suit them.
I can only talk about my experience in the SF Bay area, but these policies don't seem too out of place. Some of my co-workers go a step further and claim that companies are racist and sexist if they don't use policies like this.
Public figures also agree. Bloomberg's Emily Chang - one of San Francisco's most prominent tech reporters - encouraged adopting explicit reservation systems for women. Even though this is totally illegal in the United States.
I'll admit that at the end of the day I'm only one data point and that maybe I fell in with an especially progressive group. But this is what I'm seeing.
Lumping all white men together as if they are equally privileged is dishonest.
A poor white boy from Appalachia doesn't benefit from whatever "privilege" young white men in the Bay Area might tend to enjoy as a result of their parents' success.
And you raise a good point. The acceptability of "learn to code" when it was directed at laid off coal miners, but sudden shift to unacceptability when it was directed at journalists is extremely hypocritical. White male coal miners who went to a boot camp would have their resumes rejected on the basis of their race and gender. The same would happen to many journalists, but a substantially larger portion of journalists belong to demographics from which we do give a chance at interviewing when they come from boot camps.
Extremely naive and condescending take. You and people who think this way are on an elementary school mindset of “justice” and fighting against the man combined with a misplaced ego power trip.
So true. It is also embarrassing for many women in tech. I don't want anyone to look at me and feel threatened but I know sometimes people do feel that way.
Is there any evidence of a "general attitude" that white and asian men are bad in technology? Because if they are, they must be incredible at what they do as they keep getting hired in droves. I think the view is they're overrepresented, but the "bad" part of that is the overrepresentation, not the race or gender.
For example the American Association of Educators is trying to encourage more men to become elementary school teachers, where women are drastically overrepresented (It makes tech look like a utopian melting pot). By doing so, they're not saying women are bad, but they are saying the profession would benefit significantly from more male participation, particularly when addressing concerns specific to young boys who are more likely to struggle in school.
Sure, but are they explicitly discriminating against women in hiring teachers in order to increase the percentage of male teachers? Because more and more that's what's going on in tech companies (with the genders reversed).
But do they explicitly deny women jobs for a position where they would have hired a man? As in do men get two chances to pass an interview when women get one? Do they have blanket policies to not hire women of certain backgrounds where they do hire men of those backgrounds?
Well in my company we are using those policies. And besides just because it's happening to women in other industries does not make it any less immoral.
This is bad policy, but in my experience also an outlier. I'm actually quite surprised that a company would publish this policy, as opposed to simply executing it under the rug. I have to ask -- how large is your company? Is it public?
Secondly, I'd also disagree that about the general attitudes of folks pushing diversity initiatives. No one is trying to eliminate white and Asian men from the workforce. This is more about bringing people in, not excluding populations.
It's in the San Francisco Bay Area and it's between 1,000 and 10,000 people. I'm not going to say anything more than that because I've already posted specific statistics that can probably identify the company for people who work there. I've also probably posted enough info about myself on this profile to identify me if people really try.
Again maybe it's a regional thing, but in silicon valley policies like these are pretty standard in my experience. In fact, many of my colleagues have called people racist and sexist for opposing these policies. These poilicies aren't just accepted, they're expected. I really don't think a lot of people understand just how social acceptable it is to discriminate against white and Asian men. Multiple managers have written in public email lists that they don't intend to hire white or Asian men for certain roles, and nobody took issue with this.
I get that inclusion of women and URM doesn't have to come at the exclusion of white and Asian men, but many companies are framing diversity in terms of percentages. That inherently puts it in zero sum terms. Everyone wants to have > 30% but there aren't enough women to go around. So the only way to achieve that goal is to deny employment to qualified men. It is indeed pursuing diversity through exclusion.
I get that having boot camps to get women into tech doesn't inherently cause companies to enact discriminatory policies like these. But saying outright that men are not welcome is a clear reminder that in many peoples' eyes, men's opportunities do not deserve the same protection as other groups. Replace men with pretty much any other group (except maybe Asians) and this situation would be outrageous. If we genuinely do believe in equality, then it needs to be just as unacceptable to do the same to men.
And some of the comments on this thread is a master class of virtue signaling as well. All sides seem well represented here.
Also, who is putting up walls? Be specific please. I too come from a low income "unprivileged" family and got my first computer in high school.
And the tech industry has always been diverse. It has been the most diverse and the most meritocratic industry for a long time. It's the industry where minorities and immigrants like Jerry Yang and Sergei Brin can thrive unlike more establish industries like news, media, oil, finance, transportation, etc.
Why are you painting a false image of what the tech industry is like? There are no barriers to programming. It is the most available and meritocratic and fair industries around.
Also, your entire comment had no relevance to the article. You just went on a stereotypical virtue signaling rant.
Also, do you really want diversity, or do you want a "diverse" group of people who all think like you?
I just can't handle the hypocrisy. All over HN, you support H1-B visas and claim the tech industry's success is due to diversity provided by H1-B visas. And elsewhere, you claim the tech industry is not diverse and the problem with the tech industry is the lack of diversity.
Which is it? You can't have it both ways just to suit your agenda. Be consistent.
When people talk past each other what we get is two sides with genuine concerns feeling that the other side ignores it, thus painting the other in the worst possible interpretation possible.
You want "the other side" to acknowledge the barriers existed in our industry, and yet do not want to acknowledge that reverse discrimination directly hurt people. Being rejected for the identity you are born with hurt on a very personal and primal way.
Then we have cases like my own perspective. I have seen this kind of gender initiative for about 30 years now here in Sweden. Gender segregation in this industry has in the 30 last year gotten worse. I know for example a woman who took a "women only programming course" in the 90s, and she is now the single person left still in the programming profession out of every single person that graduated (she got a job before she graduated but that might be beyond the point). Study after study report the same where if a person belong to the minority gender in the work place, the risk that they will switch work place to one where they are majority is significant every single year. If I recall right it actually increase for each year, in particular after they graduate. Regardless if Men or women are the minority in the study, the result is similar.
The only effective measure I have seen to prevent this pattern is mentorship programs. I have not ready any in-depth explanation why they tend to work, through I strongly suspect it addresses some of the core issues behind gender segregation. An observation I made is that you can offer mentorship to both majority and minority segments of a group and the minority will more likely join and participate, which still focus the effort on the minority but does not exclude if any individuals in the majority have a similar need for the service. Obviously not everyone of that identify as belonging to the majority is identical and individuals have different needs.
What barriers are there? Everyone has access to computers and all of our software is out there on github etc. Women have more opportunities to learn to program than men do. They just don't want to. They don't understand it and don't like it. Get over it.
Just leave the women alone, they are not interested and rightfully so. In the western world there are many other jobs which are much more fun for women and they are happy to do them, including high paying professional jobs like lawyers or doctors with much higher bars for entry, and yet, women manage to study and do those jobs just fine.
In countries where programming pays well and there are no other better options you can see much more women in the field, like India or Israel, somehow those women who in many times comes from much more traditional and conservative societies, manage to learn to code like any other men. I wonder how they do it without all the affirmative action while popping out 5 kids per family or even more like the orthodox women in Israel.
It seems like modern feminism destroys the capability of women to learn anything that is not liberal arts, someone needs to research how that happened and how it is all men's fault.
People: do whatever you want to do this summer. There are virtually zero barriers to entry for programming today. They've been minimal for a good twenty years now as it is.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadGreat marketing, guys and gals!
Cheers
Lambda School's traffic is down 20% today as compared to yesterday, so if this was a marketing stunt it was a very inefficient and expensive one.
This seems weird; did you account for the time (since it's only around noon?)
Now we see a YC co-founder giving 40 women $9000 to learn to program.
Where does it end? I was really sad that while I personally can survive in this environment (if I abandon my ideals of not being judged by my genetics), many good men who are passionate about their work are being pressured from all sides.
I honestly don’t see how any of this is legal but it’s such a taboo to talk about that fixing the problem seems impossible without a major shift back to valuing skills above demographics.
Let me help you, fellow Mexican:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2017-title29-vol4/xm...
The reason it's legal is because there are laws that explicitly allow this for certain underrepresented or disadvantaged groups.
Espero que esto aclare tus dudas.
It's also worth mentioning why the term "underrepresented minority" or "underrepresented group" is need in the first place. Considering how sexist and racist people claim tech is Asians seem to be doing perfectly fine which is exactly why the term URM is needed in the first place.
So somebody asked "how can this be legal" and your answer was "because it's a law" and you're actually trying to claim the moral high ground?
Being eastern-European myself I can confirm that while the negative stuff applies, the positive doesn't.
But I say let them - I'm honestly curious what the end result of such policies will be.
It’s not apparently obvious what ethnicity I am based on looks. I had already been told there was a focus on diversity at the company I ended up getting an offer at and they “really want to build a diverse team from the ground up”. The conversation had been dragging for months and I resisted bringing up my background out of principle. I saw the hiring manager tweeting about a Latinx conference (I hate that term) and bit the bullet and told them I’m Latinx. I had an offer by the end of the week. This was after months of similar discussions with other companies where I stuck to my ideal of being hired for what I’ve accomplished and the skills I can prove I have. Ultimately I was running out of money and got desperate. I still feel terrible and angry but I have to put food on the table.
Edit: it does seem like you're being downvoted. I predict manfredo's response will be next[1]. Sigh.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464944
[1] http://fortune.com/2019/01/28/funding-female-founders-2018/
Stats like this are so useless. Obviously if males make up 95% of the pool they're more likely to have founded some of the unicorns, therefore skewing the average. If one of the 5% of females founded a unicorn I bet they'd have a greater share of VC dollars.
And yet, the OP is openly and blatant 'men need not apply'. How is that ever OK?
If anything, it's been the other way around for at least as long as I've been alive.
* Implicit discrimination is bad. I'm saying: To use that as a guide for your actions you need to have an implicit discrimination detector able to account for all the confounding variables.
* Explicit discrimination is also bad. I'm saying: As a corollary, there should not be explicit 'X need not apply' policies.
* Two wrongs make a right.
There are a few women who play college football, and they are eligible to apply in the more traditional manner. With college experience and professional coaching it's not completely impossible that they could make it, probably as kickers or punters, who don't need as much upper body strength as other positions.
It is illegal to discriminate for jobs on the basis of sex in the US (as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964). If you believe yourself to be the victim of discrimination, then submit a complaint the the EEOC [1] who will investigate.
That being said, a large gap between the number men and women (or whites and blacks, etc) working at companies exist can be considered evidence of systematic discrimination. Increasing the pool of unrepresented applicants is a great way to ensure that a diverse pool of qualified candidates get interviews, thus reduce the likelihood that a company appears to be practicing discrimination during hiring.
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm
https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/initiatives/e-race/caselist.cfm#re...
It is illegal to discriminate based on sex.
By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent you could be found discriminating
This is a sound strategy that's commonly applied to other areas of engineering. If a company produces bearings and their QA department measures bearing tolerances from a shipment sample to deviate wildly from what is expected, then the implication is their is an issue with the manufacturing process that needs to be addressed. They don't just toss a handful of under-tolerant bearing in the shipment to bring the median value inline.
In other words:
> By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent
...Is where your misunderstanding is. This idea is not over-correction -- you do no need to discriminate to achieve a specific makeup. You explicitly need to NOT discriminate and the problem will be correct itself.
ELI5: If a company was found to have a workforce that was too short. An appropriate response is to notice the problem an conduct an investigation, which determines tall people were put off from applying because the doors were too short. They correct the doors and the average height of employees naturally correct.
A wrong approach is to explicitly weight taller people more favorable in interviews.
No it can't unless you show that there are an equal number of qualified candidates, which there aren't in tech. CS grad rates for women are much lower.
Do you have any statistical evidence that proves white men are being discriminated against?
1. We only accept applicstions from candidate from non-traditional backgrounds if they're diverse. Diverse is defined as any of the following: women, black, Hispanic, or native American - maybe also veterans but I'm not sure. Non-traditional background means coming from a coding boot camp, or majoring in a non-computing related field. I think after 3 years industry experience candidates are considered traditional even if they came from one of those two.*
2. Diverse candidates get two attempts to pass the technical phone interview, non diverse get one.*
That said, when it comes to the hiring decision we don't discriminate. No disrespect for those candidates considered diverse, just take what you get. And I'm Cuban myself (but not visibly Latino) so I may have benefitted from that part of my identity myself.
Untimely I think the lower representation of Black and Hispanic people in tech roles is reflective of education rates. I suspect that were incomes and education more equal that would make representation in tech more equal. There also geography. Not many tech companies in the south where most black people live.
As for women thats a more difficult situation. I think that there's strong evidence to back up the claim that women may not choose to enter tech on their own volition. I think the solution to that is to emphasize the value of fields other than tech. Being coder at Google doesn't make a person any more valuable than a lawyer, marketer, salesperson, etc. Sure they may make more money, but that's the product of the labor market. And not to mention the average lawyer probably makes more than the average coder.
I've anecdotally seen a growing portion of coding boot camp that are exclusive to certain demographics. I wonder how much of that is due to policies like these. Especially for boot camps that only charge if the graduates get jobs in tech, I can see how it would be disadvantageous to admit white and Asian men.
* Edit: I just checked and these policies also apply to people with referrals. So one could justify this by saying we treat diverse candidates as though they have a referral.
These rhyme with soviet era policies circa 1950-1960 in Eastern Europe. At universities, there was an admission exam for 'healthy origin' people for the majority of the spots, and then another exam where everybody, including those failing the first time, could compete for the scraps. We all know how that turned out economically speaking.
Seeing the same policies in XXI century USA is surreal.
Ironically, the concern over discrimination in tech is itself the cause of a significant amount of explicit discrimination.
If the industry is systematically unfavorable to women, hiring at the same percentage as the industry as a whole (which is what matching the “percentage of tech workers that are women” is) is indicative of being fully on-line with the average degree to which the industry is systematically unfavorable to women.
It would be inconsistent to criticize the industry but not firms that were dead in the middle of the pack.
That claim only works if one assumes that any disparity is the result of systematic bias.
It's not. The CS graduation ratio is just as bad.
If the industry were either actually or even merely perceived as systematically unfavorable to women, a natural consequence would be women being less likely to pursue education focussed on the field in preference to other fields that were less unfavorable.
One example is earning prospects, which might matter more for men than for women. Personally, I was torn between studying maths and film making, for example. I decided to go for maths because of the better money making prospects (I thought), thinking I could still go into film making later.
If you don't worry about income prospects, maybe you are more likely to choose English literature of the 16th century over engineering.
Just one example.
That's how I see it anyway: mainly based on the fact that women make up only around 20% of CS majors, I don't think the issue lies in the hiring practices of most tech companies.
No, but the people they are criticizing for criticizing firms hiring at industrt-average proprotions are also criticizing the industry, which is the issue.
I must be really awful if I can't get hired as a Mexican, eh?
But we do have tools for recruiters to cross reference applicant names with the US census bureau's data to infer race and gender. We give recruiter bigger bonuses for diverse hires and we set specific % targets for them in their OKRs (basically quarterly goals. They don't get fired if they go under this, so I hesitate to call it a quota). That, and the aforementioned practices surrounding interviews and non traditional backgrounds.
Looking deeper at the documentation, I think the company maintains plausible deniability by giving recruiters discretionary authority over things like number of phone interviews and initial resume review coupled with hiring targets well above the industry average (current target for women is 33%). So the company does openly discriminate, but it gives recruiters the tools and discretion to discriminate as well as goals that essentially require discrimination to achieve - after that it's "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".
My previous statements about non traditional backgrounds and 2nd phone interviews came from recruiters themselves. I can also confirm that, absent a referral, I've done 2nd phone screens for diverse candidates and have never interviewed a non-diverse candidate from a non-traditional background.
You are ultimately selecting the factors which could affect the outcome of that opportunity.
How is that not discrimination? How do you pick and choose what you consider diverse?
When you select the factors you're ultimately not an equal opportunity employer anymore in my opinion.
Googles careers page advertises that they're both in equal opportunity employer and an affirmative action employer:
> Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.
https://careers.google.com/teams/?&src=Online/House%20Ads/BK...
So I guess the answer is yes.
[a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction]
Next time I apply somewhere I am going to check Cajun or other since we have 'ethnic status'. I am certain we Cajuns aren't well represented in tech.
I've already resigned myself that I must tell him to always check those minority boxes and he may want to consider only using his mother's surname on his resume, instead of the traditional dual surname he legally has (Example: Lopez, instead of Smith Lopez).
This farcical system can't go on forever as is. Either racial preferences in hiring will be banned under the 14th amendment, or the US will adopt a Brazil-style racial preference system, where they will actually test your blood and have technicians measure the tone of your skin and the shape of your face in order to fit you into a category.
If you are interested in the program, it seems like you could identify yourself as female and apply. Especially if there's no in-person interview.
Cynically, if enough [biological males who identify as] men elect to identify as women for this application, the selection team will have some very difficult decisions to make.
Because, you know, most companies look up the profile of candidates on LinkedIn, social media etc. Unless you actually consider yourself transgender, you would quickly be caught and removed just as quickly.
In the current cultural zeitgeist it'd be unimaginable to see someone get fired because they didn't conform to someone's rules of "transgender enough" based on their social media profile.
This is both the beauty and the irony of said zeitgeist; make all the rules you want, can't stop someone from playing.
Well, the answer is that people that are transgender will have a history of being transgender or acting in such a way that confirms they consider themselves that gender. So any lawsuit as a result of this would look into your past, see that you lied about being transgender and make it an open and shut case. If that case became public then you could say goodbye to your job prospects.
As I understand it, you sort of get to choose your gender, but society has to accept your choice.
If I declare myself a woman but make no attempt to "live as a woman" as society sees it, I'll appear to be taking advantage of the system, and my choice will be rejected and there will be social consequences.
Conversely, if I do appear to be making an honest attempt to be a woman, and you don't accept it because of your conservative values, then you cannot reject my choice, because that's bigoted.
Yes, you can change your mind about your gender, but you really need to do it in a life-upending way that feels risky and permanent and committed, then you'll be celebrated. If you phone it in, people are going to be offended and you'll be rejected.
It would be both sexist and transphobic to expect trans-women to "appear to be making an honest attempt to be a woman" by conforming to some outdated view of womanhood.
Cis-women can do anything (including any traditionally male activity like date other women, wear jeans, like football and monster trucks, like anime and video games, and in some cases, even grow beards) so why can't trans-women?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling#Name
As I mention in my other comments on this thread, it's not right to judge people on why they identify with a particular gender. Whether it's economically motivated or not, if you accept that people can choose their own gender, the reason for the choice doesn't matter.
I think that is exactly not how it is supposed to work.
Do you believe this to be ethical? Because to me I find it rather offensive considering it harms actual transgender candidates.
Unless they have explicitly stated their gender on such sites?
I am degendering my online presence now, just in case I have to present as female in the future.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
Society is worse off for having barriers that prevent anyone who wants to code from being able to do so. That includes the inefficiencies of the job industry not placing you into a productive coding role faster. But it also includes the lower salaries, lack of support/representation, belittling, and near-universal campaign of horrible harassment that every woman I've talked to in the field has experienced.
Everyone in the field of software development struggles, and I don't want to take away from that. We should be making life easier for everyone. But doing so involves recognizing problems specifically and succinctly, and building solutions that fit those problems. One of society's many problems is that women in tech have to contend with a nightmarish swirl of negative distractions that I've never had to think about as a white man. In the face of such a problem, giving resources to the effected population makes total sense, and it's a good thing that more organizations/companies are doing so. Even more than that, it brings us closer to meritocratic equality.
I am appreciative of every opportunity I have been given and will continue to take advantage of any opportunity afforded to me, even if it is on the base of my gender. If an investor wants to help a certain group of people, I will value that they are providing opportunities even though I may disagree with the idea of providing opportunities based on immutable characteristics.
However some people I have met from southern Asia coming from a farming family background likely have had much worse conditions growing up. But they get lumped into the Asian mass where you must truly excel to get noticed.
I left not too long after that.
Coding at 100 IQ level will be automated away very soon the same way anyone can have a facebook account without knowing HTML.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Also, please stop posting flamebait, especially ideological flamebait, to HN. It fuels flamewars, which destroy what we want to preserve here: thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity. Assuming those are things you also want, you're welcome to post here in that spirit.
Literacy is one of the few things taught in schools that actually has any utility in people's everyday lives.
Coding is nothing like literacy. It is more like chemistry, physics or Shakespeare - something the vast majority don't care about and will quickly forget. If you have any doubt - poll the population on Newton's three laws of motion and why they matter.
Regarding idealogical flamebait - I don't even know what that is - I'm simply expressing my opinion, that the above has hopefully clarified. If you find my stance on the school system offensive, rest assured I'll no longer reply on the matter in this thread, seeing how quick others are to judge others in a negative light.
One way to think of flamebait is low-information comments on provocative topics. Ideological flamebait is the same, on topics where the provocation tends to be ideological.
I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders. You need sales, marketing, accounting, management, HR, legal - and even the IT guys often truck along fine with little to no coding skills.
If you need code written to perform your task that usually just means the UI of your application isn't powerful enough. So get a coder to add that feature to the UI. You don't need to become a coder yourself.
Here's why we really need "more coders" all the time:
- the web frontend is getting reinvented every year
- the latest trends in infrastructure design ("terascale micro-micro-micro-services as a service") need attention
- the latest devices and platform SDKs need to be dealt with
- the insane amount of technical debt accumulated through all this churn needs to be paid off
Which is all fine only as long as the money keeps rolling in.
> I think this is an absurd and tired meme. Most shops who employ coders also employ about 75% non-coders
It would be absurd if coding skill were only useful to people whose job title and central role is “coder” (just as viewing literacy as central would be absurd if measured by the number of people employed as “writers”.)
If I followed this line of reasoning, then I couldn't hire a lawyer without knowing law, I couldn't hire a marketing person without knowing marketing, I couldn't hire a sales person without knowing sales, and so on and so forth. I would argue that knowledge in law, sales and marketing are far more important to a founder, yet people obsess over coding.
> Getting the fundamentals in an intense summer course will not only enable someone to develop a prototype on their own, but also assess who is a good potential hire and who is just good at bullshitting.
I don't think that's true. To accurately judge someone else's competence, you have to be at least on their level. Secondly, it's credentials like work experience and education that you go by when hiring. I'm aware that a lot of software developers are often forced to pass lots of silly programming tests, but that's known to not result in better hiring.
If you are a founder and non-technical, you shouldn't hire a random developer anyway. You should have a technical co-founder that you can trust and you should focus on literally everything else. You'll need to do a thousand things, but writing code isn't really one of them.
If you want to be as accurate as possible, then yes. But there is a whole spectrum of accuracy in-between those two options, and being "somewhat ok" (which is what this program, I assume, is supposed to help the attendees achieve) is better than "completely guessing, because I have zero relevant knowledge"
https://tim.blog/2019/03/21/learn-to-code/
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_litteris_colendis
Yeah I've heard the meme that "coding teaches you how to think". I don't buy it. I could make the same unsubstantiated claim about playing chess or some other mental gymnastics.
> Here’s a good write up from author Clive Thompson about how he learned to code, and how it helped him, when he was writing a book
He doesn't really give very convincing examples that it helped him professionally, but the time investment was substantial. That's called a hobby.
http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/why-i-started-the-summer...
Programs like this really work.
Hint for picking a random image when clicking on the image: The currently shown image should be excluded from the list of images to draw from. This prevents the problem that sometimes clicks appear to do nothing, although in reality the same image was randomly picked again.
Good luck to the author :)
It's https and 100 speed score on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=.... I'm guessing this is on something like Netlify, as it's fast and there is HN hug of death.
Talk about relatable. 10 years in and I still feel this way.
Valuable wisdom! Thus inspired, I might make it "If you aren't embarrassed, you haven't shipped yet"
She can send a oneliner PR to get her site included on https//fullname.dev if she wants, and if she hasn't yet started using GutHub this would be a good learning opportunity for it.
Do you or your girlfriend have any advice for her? A good tutorial or course or book that's been really helpful to your girlfriend and can help mine ship something soon?
The courses and self teaching went a long way. I started at a crappy digital design agency and now work at a company many people have heard of!
Good luck to your girlfriend! I'm inspired by her.
Haha what a fun website.
Do you or your girlfriend have any advice for her? A good tutorial or course or book that's been really helpful to your girlfriend and can help mine ship something soon?
I'll offer my services to Lambda School and/or YC for free if that means I can extent this offer to EU people, provided that my living expenses are covered. I'm in between jobs so I have the perfect schedule for it.
I'm from the EU.
(This is nowhere near the worst guideline violation in this thread, but it's such a precise one.)
One friend recently complained to me that all the AA enthusiasts just want to talk about feminism and women in the workplace, and not about actually writing code. She was incensed because she was invited to a 'Girls Code' meetup, where women would learn about algorithms by modelling their own menstrual cycles[0]. She was (understandably) frustrated, saying that her interests extend beyond what comes out of her genitals.
This is anecdotal, sure, but amongst my social circle, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
I sense a bazillion downvotes coming my way. You may think these opinions I am passing along are incredibly incorrect, but they are the opinions of women.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/jFLU0C8
EDIT: It took no time at all for the downvotes to arrive, as expected. There is no such thing as the sisterhood. Feminists will immediately cast out any woman who doesn't hold the "right" opinions.
Insane reasoning looking back, but hey 17 year olds are often principled nutcases. I can definitely imagine doing what you describe re compsci if I was a 17 year old girl in 2019. Hope any principled girls (in my biased opinion the brightest/best people in the end) we lose from information tech go into something else useful, kind of a sad thought.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From the discussion/debate I’ve had in the past, I perceive a strong overlap between people who would aggressively dismiss these women’s opinions, and also people who say we should “just listen to women”.
I have no agenda to push women into tech specifically, but coincidentally most of the people I have mentored and brought into tech have been women. This is likely because I’m in tech, and I’ve always spent more time with women. It puts me in an awkward position when I encourage a woman to attend an event like Rails Girls (which I had heard is an excellent experience for women), and then that woman comes back and says she hated it, and that very few of the women there actually wanted to do any programming, and that most of them just wanted to talk about gender politics.
In any case, I’m glad you weren’t deterred.
Of course, feel free to waste your money and your reputation doing this pointless virtue signaling anyway.
However, I also worry about the motives behind the program. A huge part of feminism is a push towards gender equality[1]. Discriminating against half of the population while aiming for equality is an odd way to behave.
I know the blog post did not mention gender equality as a goal, but I just completely fail to see how discrimination like this will lead to anything but increased inter-gender conflict and the persistence of stereotypes in the field.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
But I guess I'll just get down voted too.
And so, to further the goal of equal opportunity, one must balance an already unbalanced set of scales. Not to do so is merely to accept its bias as the status quo.
This is a biased interpretation itself that assumes there is preexisting bias. It is true that the premise requires acceptance of the ideas you put forth above, but the issue is that many people don't believe those are enough of a factor anymore to justify discrimination. Imbalance does not always equate to unfairness.
There are philosophical cases to be made that the wrong must be righted asap, or that this approach is an instance of two wrongs not making a right.
For me, assuming good intentions, I choose other things to be upset about than people being selectively nice or helpful to others who are dealing with a problem.
I can understand the concern that leaning too hard in to this kind of thing can get out of hand, so as with everything, probably best to do our research and decide case by case.
What do people think start-ups are exactly? Random people with no domain expertise coding their way to great products?
Also one can't get to 5 years without doing the 1st year. So I don't really see your point.
2. Perhaps there are domain experts with 5-10 years of experience in _something_ and them learning to be technical is impactful?
The author went on to mention that learning in the span of a summer would help pick a good team member or even build a prototpe him/herself.
We know from both studies and personal experience, that tech interviews just don't work all that well. This is tech interviews done by professional programmers and managers. We don't know how to pick people who are good vs talk like they're good!
This is not anecdotal - it is well known via studies, done by top psychologists.
Given that - how would a summer coding bootcamp help pick a co-founder? It's certainly better than nothing. It is also not clear how much one would benefit from 3 months versus taking one of the many excellent online courses and working at your own pace, such as Harvard's CS50, freely available on youtube.
Regarding building your own prototype after 3 months of programming - I just want to throw my hands up in the air of this wishful thinking that 3 months is anywhere close to enough time. You will need someone who's tech savvy, and then you're right back to the same difficulties.
On the one hand, women have obviously been disadvantaged in many ways, for many years, which is wrong. The gender disparity in software development is well documented, and should be fixed. No one should be discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied because of gender.
On the other hand, a for-profit company deciding to offer free services to individual women, who may or may not be disadvantaged, simply because they're women, doesn't sit well with me either. Frankly, it seems likely that anyone who applies to lambda school (either gender), probably lean towards the more advantaged end than the less advantaged end. So it seems likely this is going to result in women with plenty of advantages already, receiving $9000 worth of education for free, while explicitly denying this opportunity to men, and continuing to disadvantage members of both groups.
So, I guess my question is, why is this morally OK? If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people, or disadvantaged women, or if it was a non-profit, it seems like this would be an easier call for me.
Is there any evidence that this is happening, though? I've never seen anybody, even anecdotally claim "I'm a woman (who is qualified) and I've been unable to find employment". Mostly what I see is people trying to work backwards and say, "if group X makes up Y% of the population and only Z% of programmers, that in itself must be evidence of discrimination".
EDIT: Here's one paper that talks about how "widely shared cultural beliefs about gender" affect early decisions people make wrt to their careers https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9501/f/pu...
"The results of this study show that males assess their own mathematical competence higher than their otherwise equal female counterparts"
"self-assessments of task competence were found to influence career-relevant decisions, even when controlling for commonly accepted measures of ability. For males and females, the higher they rate their mathematical competence, the greater the odds that they will continue on the path leading to careers in the quantitative professions. However, since males tend to overestimate their mathematical competence relative to females, males are also more likely to pursue activities leading down a path toward a career in science, math, and engineering."
Your claim may have been true at one time, but I don't think it has been for awhile now.
*Edit: In response to your paper: It looks like it's a research paper, not a study, written almost 20 years ago, referencing material that was ~10 years old at the time of its publication. It well may have been true, but the time the original research was collected (in the 90s) is about the time I'd argue a major cultural shift happened.
I wouldn't say that the problem is solved and it doesn't happen anymore though. I provided one study above, feel free to look up more, there are plenty. Something like 80% of STEM jobs are still held by men, and obviously that's not totally a result of discouragement, but seems likely to me that part of it is.
I can anecdotally confirm that I've witnessed women in software engineering be discouraged from learning software engineering at the undergraduate level, often from TAs/Professors.
I can also point to other reported anecdotes, such as the big Riot Games article, several blogs/tweets confirming the article, the Uber NYT article, etc.
The literal quote 'unable to find employment' does not coincide with the quoted portion 'discouraged from learning, or opportunities denied'. Employment is one of the last opportunities that can be denied or discouraged towards women- we have a wealth of educational, internship, volunteering, etc. opportunities that can serve to winnow the pipeline of appropriate female candidates before discussing employment.
Note: I'm not arguing that this is universal to all women in the engineering field, merely providing some response to "I have never even heard of this phenomenon anecdotally".
Perhaps the son really did love this stuff and perhaps the daughter was given the opportunity to do other things. Perhaps this was a one-off coincidence. But my experience is littered with this stuff. It happened even to me. I've got two parents who were both software engineers and I was given toys as a child that were designed to develop technical skills and my sister wasn't.
The research community does not have a better explanation for the disparity than social bias.
Does this actually work though? My whole life, I've been weakly encouraged, mainly by my parents, to study economics and/or law, and discouraged (weakly by my parents, and strongly by society and bullies) from being a geek / programmer / mathematician... But in the end, I picked the latter.
That's not really true. There is a lot of research showing that men and women have different interests and make different life choices, and that these choices impact career demographics. One of the most well-researched differences is that men tend to be more interested in "things", especially mechanical things, and women tend to be more interested in "people".
Here is a journal article from Frontiers in Psychology that investigates how these differences-in-interest impact STEM field participation: "All STEM fields are not created equal: People and things interests explain gender disparities across STEM fields" (1):
> In the current study, we investigated the gender differences in interests as an explanation for the differential distribution of women across sub-disciplines of STEM as well as the overall underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. (...) We found gender differences in interests to vary largely by STEM field, with the largest gender differences in interests favoring men observed in engineering disciplines (d = 0.83–1.21), and in contrast, gender differences in interests favoring women in social sciences and medical services (d = −0.33 and −0.40, respectively).
> Importantly, the gender composition (percentages of women) in STEM fields reflects these gender differences in interests. The patterns of gender differences in interests and the actual gender composition in STEM fields were explained by the people-orientation and things-orientation of work environments, and were not associated with the level of quantitative ability required. (...)
Some studies show that these things-vs-people differences begin to manifest extremely early in life, before humans could be influenced by social factors. One famous study of this phenomenon is "Sex differences in human neonatal social perception" (2):
> Sexual dimorphism in sociability has been documented in humans. The present study aimed to ascertain whether the sexual dimorphism is a result of biological or sociocultural differences between the two sexes. 102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin.
It is also known that testosterone levels affect decision-making and career choices, and that women tend to be more financially risk-averse than men. Since men's testosterone levels tend to be much higher than women's, and since men are less risk-averse, that results in demographic differences. For an investigation of this, see the article "Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone" (3). For another study on sex and brain differences see (4). There is a lot of research out there exploring the differences between men and women, and how those differences play out in our lives.
Every person should be supported in choosing whatever career interests them, and should not be judged based on demographics. I'm not advocating for any kind of discrimination. I am just observing that even with total equality of opportunity, if there are biological trends in interest differences, then we will see differences in overall job demographics.
(1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018... (2) https://www...
1. Software Engineering has become more social over time. The idea of the loner software developer has sort of vanished as open offices become the norm and the collaborative nature of software engineering grows.
2. Women majors in computer science has dropped like a rock over the past few decades [1]
These two points seem to refute your explanations, considering software development at one time had a signiciant amount of developers that were women. If women were somehow biologically uninclined to be software engineers, the statistics don't seem to follow this train of thought.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
If money and the like were of no concern I might consider pursuing photography over coding. However, just because I love that a little more, doesn't necessarily mean I'm not interested in code.
There are absolutely people who will pursue things they have little to no interest in, but there are also people who will pick one over another because one is just a little bit better for whatever reason. How about we don't discount that people can have multiple passions?
I'm not trying to make a comment about individuals, only about trends that we might see in the population at large.
The topic further up was whether differences in job participation can be explained by reasons other than discrimination - the answer is that, yes, they can be explained by other factors such as biological trends in interest differences. One needs to control for these factors before drawing conclusions about discrimination.
It doesn't matter to a boy in primary school what proportion of men there are in tech, they just want the opportunities others are getting. For some reason "other people wanted equality of opportunity in the past but didn't get it, so you can't have it now" is supposed to answer this.
Meanwhile noone seems to care that all the teachers, and all the elected governors, in the school are female; but if a lesson can't have only male scientists mentioned in it ... which seems massively inconsistent.
I'd truly encourage you to go hang out with some real activists working on this stuff. We do care about teachers being majority female (though things get much more male as you get to higher education as well as administration roles like principals).
Cool, but that has nothing to do with industry bias. This same phenomenon is shown by enrollment rates at university in CS.
The most important point here is that this stuff is everywhere and deep. When people say they've never seen any bias I encourage them to ask all their male peers if they used toys as children as an entry into tech. Then I ask if those toys were marketed at boys. Repeat for female peers. You find a lot of influence in this manner.
Anecdotal, but me and my dad tried so, so hard to get my sister into computers back in the 80s and 90s. Even just to use them, let alone program them. She had no interest. Absolutely zero.
She also had no interest in Legos, or Dungeons & Dragons, or video games, even though I tried to get her into them just so I could have another person to do these things with.
Ironically, she's now a successful project manager in her employer's IT department, managing software development projects.
> If this was targeted specifically to disadvantaged people
You already accepted women have been disadvantaged though.
There's nothing in this release saying they want to offer this to disadvantaged women, they simply want to offer it to women.
But you've said they have been disadvantaged as a group, so they are offering it to a disadvantaged group. I think you're saying they should be disadvantaged in a way besides their gender?
From the lens of intersectionality, I could interpret 'disadvantaged women' to mean women who are also part of another marginalized group (e.g. trans women, women of color, women with disabilities, etc.)
But I could also read your comment as just asking them to be explicit and emphasize that they are making an offering for "women, a group of people at a disadvantage".
Because it’s a for profit organization it makes total sense for them. It has marginal cost but acts as huge marketing factor.
I can tell you why. In part, it's explicit sexism and goal keeping from men, sure. But a far bigger reason there are less women in tech?
Step into any engineering course at a 4 year university. Come back and tell me how many women where in your class. Get the picture?
Of COURSE there are less women in engineering jobs. They are less women in engineering classes! So while there are definitely sexism problems, far BIGGER issues exist with reforming gender roles CULTURALLY.
Women should be encouraged from a young age to pursue science if it interests them. They should not be given artificial leg ups to help balance a problem which will never go away without addressing the root cause.
I agree that this is a definite possibility but I struggle to identify a reason to explain the disparities of participation in subfields purely from a genetic point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
[3] These differences are based on population distributions, and there are plenty of outliers within those distributions, eg. masculine women, feminine men. I am speaking of averages here.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Aggression_and_cr...
That confusion is why I'm having a lot of difficulty personally buying that much of the differences can be attributed to biological differences in women and men. I feel like I'm missing some evidence where it is proven computer science is more aggressive than, say, structural engineering- and that's why there is a bigger representation of men in computer science.
If this graph is real, that's not actually true.
https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/2875/why-did...
Does this mean that chemical engineering is less aggressive of a field than mechanical engineering? Or that computer science engineering is more aggressive of a field than environmental engineering? Or that chemical engineering is the engineering field with the most amount of doll-like objects being interacted with?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_engineering_in_the_Un...
Another reason might be “contact with people” variable. As a programmer I can work the whole day and not interact with anyone, and I like it. I never worked in chemistry or engineering, but if my high-school lessons are any indication, chemistry involves a lot more interactive lab work than say physics and math.
Everyone should be free to pursue a profession that interests them, without artificial cultural hurdles like racism and sexism. At the same time however, we as society should not EXPECT that women (or men) will equilibrate over time. If there are differences, let them be. But ensure equal opportunity.
And the same could be said for other fields. Step in to a construction site/auto dealership/mechanic shop/sports field and tell me how many women you see. Are all those fields dominated by sexist men as well?
And for men, how many are nurses/teachers/social workers/counselors/human resources vs women? Are all those fields dominated by sexist women?
Could it be that women enjoy jobs with more human interaction and men are more content to sit in front of a computer screen?
Regardless of whether or not that is true, I believe we should all have the opportunity to pursue whatever interests us. Equal Opportunity. This does not mean we should expect Equal Outcome. Those are two entirely different things.
Programs like "Women: Learn to Program This Summer" are Equal Outcome programs. They provide unfair advantages to a certain subset of society, with the explicit intent of "evening the score". That's a dangerous game to play.
If your contention is correct, the absence of male teachers for impressionable young children must be a massively damaging thing? Much worse than a preponderance of one sex or another of students in a lecture theatre?
It's a partial solution to a small part of a big problem.
Clearly not IMO, there needs to be a morally defensible reason for restricting the field by physical characteristics; sex and skin colour/race are not good reasons in general.
Now, it may turn out that you might want to evaluate an aggregate measure of disadvantage per person, so you can sort people by level-of-disadvantage and apply that first. But that method may be brittle; if you choose the relative weighting of various forms of disadvantage wrong, then you're applying your benefit in a way that deviates from the "true" perfect-information order anyway.
One way of resolving this is to say "we're not going to attempt to apply this benefit in a perfectly Rawlsian order; we're just going to pick a main effect to attack and, while doing less good than a perfect-information solution, will still almost certainly do more good than harm.".
This thread, and past threads on this subject turn into an absolute shit-show and cause tribalism/division. I feel like that is evidence enough that these policies are harmful.
When you do/don't get a job there's uncertainty around the reason. Was it my experience/skill-set, or race/gender/sexual orientation/religion? It feels like we're trying to fix discrimination by forcing everyone to feel like they might be experiencing it.
Why should it be fixed? Is there any evidence to suggest it's because of discrimination? There's been special treatment for women (such as this one) for so long now. Have you ever considered that maybe women just don't want to sit in front of a computer for hours on end writing software?
Also, I walked past a building site the other day. Full of men. They work through the night for not much money. Where's all the special programs to get women in to back-breaking overnight construction work?
Now, if for some reason women don't take this road and "need" someone to hold their hand in order to learn programming, I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources.
Not to mention that programming can be a tedious and lame job (sitting in front of a computer all day is often mentioned as a genuine nightmare), so if you have to do it, you'd better love it in the first place.
No?
Stuff like pointers, for loops, threads, interface design, data structures, idempotency, source control, working on a linux command line, etc. all present reasonably challenging roadblocks for a burgeoning developer, and I think many of us benefited from having someone around to help walk us through this the first time.
That's an interesting example. Sure, I was initiated to the Unix command line at the University, but it was just that : an initiation. I got hooked quickly though so I was driven to learn the rest all by myself (or rather, with the help of the linux community online). I'm sure it's more or less the same for most linux nerds. I may have bought one or two books about linux though, but buying a book about a subject you're passionate about is something normal.
You're right that once you want to get into the important technical details, free documentation on the web may be insufficient and you may need to invest in proper textbooks. I still think my point stands, though.
It wasn't until I used Linux professionally that I started to really respect (and enjoy) using the environment. And even then it wasn't until I saw another human using it efficiently. It's one thing to read about how useful it is, it's another thing to struggle with a problem and have someone show you how you could solve your exact problem.
Once I had that connection with another human/mentor, seeing my specific problem solved, that's what hooked me. I don't think I could have gotten there with toy/educational examples online/in books.
For programming, the available documentation is not just ludo-educational, it's also the official references, like the RFCs and specifications. There is literally no better source of knowledge for computer science. I haven't delved into technical specs very often in my life, but I have at times and I bet most good programmers do it often.
A good instructor will also guide you to good learning materials. There's lots of terrible books out there, but I found good books through my classes. Though, it's probably easier to find learning materials today than when I began.
I don't understand why women in general need special help or guidance.
I do, but my explanation is not PC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Depends on how much you think anything else sucks. Compared to physical labor you're not breaking your back over things.
Compared to other jobs you get paid relatively ok (EU centric view).
Compared to some jobs the hours aren't that crazy: hey McKinsey folk! How are you doing? :D
Really, it isn't that simple. It depends.
It helps if you like it, but a job is a job and if you can perform it, then why do you need to like it?
Moreover, did you ever read about the overjustification effect [0]? Long story short, if you like something, you might dislike it after you get paid for it.
Also, if you love programming you might be biased in always solving a problem in a technical way. You'd become that guy from the LEGO movie that always screams "SPACESHIP!" [2]
Full disclosure: I like programming and sometimes can force myself into loving it [1]. The consequences of loving programming: no social life, no normal diet, sleep rhythm is off. I'm basically just doing one thing as much as possible: programming.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
[1] As a mettamage I have some control over my psyche and I can quite often, but not always, force myself to like or even love things that I initially hate ;-)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TYJyCCO8Dc
Not always true, sometimes you have to help lift boxes (100lb) carrying hardware with your software preinstalled / ready to be shipped because you work in a small office and paying someone off to do the same task 1 day randomly throughout the different quarters of the year is not worth the hassle.
It's the difficulty of keeping yourself motivated and do what you need to do. Making a commitment, such as joining a class or education, is massively helpful.
> I would argue that maybe those women don't have the intrinsic motivation to do so and trying to force it upon them may be a gross waste of time and resources.
It may come as a shock but most people don't work with their ultimate passion. And often even if you start working with your passion you'll have to deal with the ugly sides and you might lose the passion. Sometimes a job is just a job.
The problem is that people learning programming for the first time, who don't have a passion for it, can find themselves in a class with those who do. I have witnessed, first hand, people who were beginners getting left in the dust by their classmates on a group project and ultimately dropping out of CS/SE entirely.
But the problem isn't that new people join classes. The problem is experienced programmers being in the same class as beginners.
I could often just do the assignments myself and skip the rest of the course. The real problem was when I was forced to partner up with someone new.
I think the problem is deeper than that, though. Computer science is a challenging field and programming is a discipline that benefits from a large amount of experience. Universities try to sell their CS programs as accessible to beginners yet tend to be very quiet about the extremely high dropout rates.
Look at it this way. How well would I do if I enrolled in a fine arts program? I would essentially be a total beginner at drawing and painting. My classmates would include people who have been drawing and painting more-or-less nonstop since they were young children. Is it reasonable for me to expect the same level of career success as these born artists?
There may be a lot of jobs out there for people with basic programming skills, just as there may be jobs doing mundane art and design. But I think it's a bit ridiculous for a total beginner to go into an exceptionally rigorous, programming-heavy, academic CS program and expect to do well. The fact that universities try to sell people on this is disappointing, to say the least.
I find these kind of "initiatives" quite condescending.
Why would you assume that a programming course amounts to "hand holding" just because a single gender is involved?
For that matter, why would you assume the women taking this course are unmotivated?
If this exact same program allowed men and women, would you still be casting the same aspersions only on the women, or would you also be implying that trying to "force" the men to program is a waste of time and resources?
Gender is not important here. As a matter of fact, I wanted to edit my post and talk about people in general, but I did not bother. This article was about women.
My point is that I have the feeling that programming is something most people learn more or less for free with the documentation available online and with the help of online programming communities. The lack of intrinsic motivation is how I explain someone (woman or man) may need financial support and a IRL teacher.
Nevertheless, the classes being offered here appear to be online, through Lambda School[0].
[0]https://lambdaschool.com/about/
I don't understand why handholding is bad and why it should be used as an argument against women coding. When men do it, it's called mentoring.
Oh that's easy just send a cURL request with header Accept: application/json ..... OK what's cURL, what's a header? So for us that have been in the game it is easier to "learn to code" another language as there are parallels everywhere and you have that baseline knowledge of how things generally work. Just try to explain something that you feel is "relatively straightforward" to a person not exposed to tech... I made the same mistake and thought it was straightforward, it is not as you are making many assumptions about knowledge. I am at the point where I am familiar with a lot of stuff and can Google things I don't know but what if you had no idea what even to search for? That is where instruction helps.
I would love to learn to code. It's the reason I originally joined HN closing in on a decade ago. (Proof: my first post, the day I joined: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713015)
But I have found that one barrier to me getting anywhere is a lack of ability to ask questions and get meaningful answers. Men often have male friends that they can shoot the breeze with and casually mention some coding thing and get some kind of reply from one or more people.
And my experience is that men don't talk to me that way. I don't have any buddies I can shoot the breeze with who will go "Oh, yeah, that thing is a known issue and you need to do yadda." Men shooting the breeze with me are inevitably hitting on me, even if they are married.
I've been here a long time. People here mostly don't hit me up via private email and things like that to just chat about a thing. When I have explicitly said "You can email me to discuss that further." I never get emails to discuss that further. Instead, I get inquiries into when I next plan to vacation in their part of the world and suggestions that I would enjoy visiting their lovely country (and, hint, hint, they would love to have coffee with me should I happen to casually drop by their country on vacay, because that's clearly how desperately poor women who can't pay their damn bills spend their time, globe trotting to hook up with random internet strangers who apparently thought "Wow, a woman speaking to me. She must be looking for sex!").
I've occasionally had brief stints of being able to have casual conversations in a chat environment with a guy who happened to be an IT guy. I found it enormously, incredibly, mind-blowingly useful and valuable to get those casual comments of "Oh, are you doing X? Cuz, you know, X don't work. Did you think of yadda?" But most of the time, I simply don't have access to that kind of conversation.
Nearly a decade of hanging on HN has failed to magically give me such access. Anytime I comment on how frustrated I am about such things, I am inevitably pissed all over by people acting like I am making shit up -- because, yes, clearly, this is how you welcome women into the bro coders club, by pissing on them at every available opportunity.
I still would like to learn to code. I spend a lot of time online. I think men vastly underestimate how much support they have access to. A small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours and hours of time by pointing you in the right direction. As a woman, I mostly can't get access to those types of comments. Men are too busy trying to figure out how to ask for my phone number.
I really don't know how to adequately describe the ginormous Wall of China style deafening silence that faces me and that helps keep me poor, unable to figure out coding and a zillion other things that drive me crazy.
To be clear, I'm not posting this to just whine about my pathetic life. That's inevitably the interpretation most people make of such comments by me. It's frankly just another means to shut me out, dismiss me and invalidate my points.
I'm posting it to try to elucidate the fact that guys have more access to support than they seem to appreciate. I can't join a chat or slack channel and count on getting help because I posted a question. I can count on being dismissed, sexually harassed and treated like an unwelcome intruder.
And that's a giant barrier that men mostly don't seem to face. Men can talk to other men casually and get loads of useful information that is simply not accessible to me. If it were, I think I would already be a coder with sev...
That is just hard to understand. If your gender is an issue, why even make it public in the first place? I mean, ever heard of the saying "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
If she has to hide her sex in order to get meaningful answers, that right there is a huge impediment us men in tech never have to experience.
Her picking "Doreen" as a username was her publicizing her gender. She can't do that and at the same time complain about being treated as a woman.
It's not a "huge impediment". She'd just have to pick a gender-neutral pseudonym. Is it really such a big deal?
She's not complaining about "being treated as a woman"; she is specifically complaining about this:
> "I can't join a chat or slack channel and count on getting help because I posted a question. I can count on being dismissed, sexually harassed and treated like an unwelcome intruder."
I don't think people should have to hide their identity in order to be able to discuss tech with their peers without harassment or being dismissed.
I don't care one whit about what gender an engineer or technician is, nor do I even know all the time online -- sometimes I find out years later, sometimes I never find out, but I've never cared.
If you want to learn to code, join one of the free Udacity courses, or MIT or Harvard's free EdX courses, and learn, and write your projects. Nobody's going to stop you. Information is free. And you got a whole stack of useful responses to the post you just linked.
Posted by a user with a female name & received substantial feedback.
But here are a few observations about that post:
The HN account in question has under 300 karma. There are three posts, all about the book this person is writing. All comments by the account are in replies to those posts. The account has made zero effort to participate generally in discussion here.
She's not trying to network. She's developing a single project and getting public feedback.
Here are a few other observations for you:
Between my original handle and this one, I have more than 40K karma. My previous handle was briefly on the leaderboard. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard.
I've just looked. I think I can confidently determine the full names of twelve of the top fifteen members of the HN leaderboard quite readily, with minimal effort. Many of them use their name or some portion of it as their handle or some portion of it. (First name, last initial; first initial, last name; etc.)
Yet I am routinely told that I should hide my gender online to avoid problems.
Here is a post I made in January that I wrote and self-posted. It got substantial karma and substantial comments and 60K+ page views total (about 55k the first couple of days):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009
It got one and exactly one private email from someone potentially professionally meaningful to me. I replied to that email. They did not reply to my reply. So I don't know how useful that is for networking purposes.
It made zero money, though it had a Patreon link and a PayPal link at the time. I spent about two weeks developing that piece.
People on HN use adblockers more aggressively than normal and ads generally are doing pretty poorly these days. All of HN expects quality writing on the front page, all day, every day. They decry pay walls and will post workarounds for pay walls.
Regular journalism sites are struggling and dying. They can't figure out how to pay their bills.
HN generally trends towards well-heeled male programmers, lawyers and other respected professionals. Yet they don't want to support writers. I am routinely told "get a real job" by people here.
There is no method by which the HN audience is willing to pay for content. Not by patronage, not by subscriptions, not by tip jars and certainly not by ads. The expectation that people post good content and make it freely available to the general public kind of worked when you could make money via ads. But ad payments have dropped across the board by 75 percent or more online for most sites that I know of.
I mean, I could just go on and on, but it's pointless because you aren't here to understand the problem space. You are here to post a single link as a "gotcha" that proves in your mind that there is no sexism on HN.
If there is no sexism on HN, why do I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of 100 names?
(Please note that a lot more than 100 people have spent time on it. As far as I can tell, that means that not even 1 percent of the members who have spent time there post as openly female. Please note the qualifier there of openly female. I am aware that it is possible that someone has made the leaderboard while hiding the fact that they are female.)
Anyway, this argument is incredibly tiresome and I think I need to try to go do other things. More people piling on to try to somehow dismiss me is not some kind of good faith engagement by any stretch of the imagination.
I genuinely do wish you success. But I've been complicit in this wall of silence for a long time, and I make no apologies for that. Your comment history suggests that any good faith attempt to engage with you will most likely be futile.
You preemptively dismiss anyone who doesn't pander to your claims of sexism and class-ism. A minor disagreement about even the most banal of topics can lead to accusations of "pissing" or "crapping" all over you. Your constant Gish gallop of grievances makes it difficult to focus on any one of them for long enough to make any constructive difference.
I wish I could be of some help, but I'm pretty certain that any good advice will continue to go unheeded. Until that changes, I can only say: Best wishes to you.
It would be nice if more people would make an effort to engage me in good faith rather than blame me for my lack of traction.
I'm quite confident that I have gotten whatever traction I do have due to being very reasonable in the face of a mountain of crazy-making BS.
It winds up being a damned if I do, damned if I don't situation.
For the record, in response to my comments here today, someone emailed me privately to offer an hour of their time this weekend to discuss my desire to learn to code. Hopefully that's a sign of better things to come.
I'm noting it to say there are, in fact, options beyond refusing to engage me or blaming me (or other women, people of color, etc). I'm stating it for the benefit of anyone wondering what they can do about such issues.
I'm very well aware that it's difficult to engage someone who is angry and complaining. But not pointing out the barriers to participation also doesn't foment change.
I wish it worked to just show up and participate as if my gender was irrelevant. But the truth is I did that initially and the result was souch push back, I went digging to figure out why. And that's the reason I know I'm "prominent" for a woman here. Because I was making waves and it was coming back to bite me at a time when I was nowhere near having enough karma for the leaderboard.
I would love to have zero reason to bitch about sexism on HN. It was never anything I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to participate in conversation and learn to code and further my projects, just like the guys here do. And that proved impossible.
> small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours
Sometimes it can. But if you're just a beginner, you don't need the expert advice you're talking about. Hours and hours of what? If you're already programming even at very entry level, you can get very similar advice on stackoverflow.
> If it were, I think I would already be a coder with several published projects.
I don't think you lack expert advice. I think you lack interest.
I remember since pre-teen, I was obsessed about computers, first videogames, then computers in general. I've spent hundreds of hours tinkering with them, trying to make them do what I wanted them to. I wasn't motivated by money, it was fun.
Vast majority of exceptionally good programmers I know can tell similar stories about themselves. There're a few women among them, too.
When you have interest that strong, you spend hundreds of hours of your time, unpaid, doing what you like. Especially when you're a teen with no kids. That's what helps with learning programming. Also reading good books. Expert advice only becomes relevant much later, and by that time, if you pick jobs well, you'll be surrounded with smart people willing to answer your questions.
If you don't have that kind of interest in computers, you won't become exceptionally good. You probably can still learn the trade and make a living off it, but will require substantial time and efforts. I think that's the target audience of that summer school.
To your second point, not all software jobs are as solitary and asocial as you seem to believe. Pairing, project planning, application product design, are all things that are done with other people. In fact, I am a software engineer and have more than a few days at work where I don't even touch my computer, yet still get a lot of work done.
The archetype of the solitary, 100% self-learned hacker as a representative of all, or even most of tech workers has been outgrown by the industry. Even the use of the term "hand-holding" as I've seen it used is a gatekeeper mentality IMO that needs to stop, or at least be toned back significantly. People that don't pull their weight certainly exist, but everyone learns and contributes in their own way.
Isn't this true for content covered by the vast majority of all secondary and college courses?
Incredible, thanks for putting your money where your values are @jl.
As for the numerous comments in this post around reverse sexism / reverse discrimination:
1. This is a private individual giving personal capital to other private individuals, supporting a personal cause. It is hard to both claim principles of free market and rally against this.
2. Private companies making hiring decisions are correcting for an indefinite history of bias. That doesn't mean they're hiring unqualified individuals, simply that they're making sure they put in measure to correct for biases and can identify individuals with the great qualifications that in the past would have been past up due to arbitrary euphemisms for gender / racial bias like 'bad culture fit'.
3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.
You're absolutely right that free market doesn't mean your choices are exempt from criticism. That isn't my point, nor where I applied 'Free Market'.
My point was: If you're going to argue against this donation, saying that it fuels the trend of reverse racism / sexism that makes the free market more distorted, I would argue that this donation is very much a part of the free market. Private donations to private organizations for private causes.
This is trying to eat your cake and still have it though.
If you ask a staunch free market person whether we should have laws restricting private activity or freedom of association, they say no. If you want to have a private organization and only invite women or only invite men then have at it.
But if you're going to have a law against that, over their objection, then it should at least be enforced consistently against everyone.
Objecting to the lack of consistency is different than objecting to the original principle.
Can you help me understand it better? Are you saying that it is currently against the law for @jl to donate to Lambda School to sponsor 40 men to attend for free? I don't think that is your point, but I'm having trouble interpreting it any other way.
Maybe none of them apply in this case. But given the complexity and somewhat arbitrary nature of the requirements, that seems more like happenstance than some reasoned choice to have this specific type of thing excluded as opposed to the others, and we probably ought to be more consistent one way or the other.
For example, if MIT (a private university) wanted to have a program like this, should it be allowed in this case but not in their case just because their institution does some unrelated publicly funded research or whatever the restriction is?
But then you're also opening them up to being an entirely or almost-entirely gender segregated school if they want to be. So which one is it?
You never heard the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right?"
I was quoting that commenter.
You make it sound like there are people out there saying to themselves, "I know I should stop discriminating against under-represented minorities, but I just can't seem to stop myself" as if discriminating were addictive like smoking. If somebody used to discriminate and wants to stop, the solution is to stop discriminating, not discriminate in the other direction. But this isn't somebody who used to reject people under vague euphemisms and needs this "nicotine patch" to help them kick the habit - this is somebody who's creating new euphemisms to discriminate in a way that's socially acceptable.
"No one thinks they're immune to bias, but no one thinks in the moment that they're making a biased decision."
> For the auditions, the musicians would be playing behind a screen, in an effort to remove all chance of bias and allow for a merit based selection only - a selection that would hopefully increase the number of women in the orchestra.
> To their surprise, their initial audition results still skewed male.
> Then they asked the musicians to take off their shoes. The reason? The sound of the women's heels as they entered the audition unknowingly influenced the adjudicators. Once the musicians removed their shoes, almost 50% of the women made it past the first audition.
[1] https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-prov...
https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-g...
>> Women are about 5 percentage points more likely to be hired than are men in a completely blind audition, although the effect is not statistically significant. The effect is nil, however, when there is a semifinal round, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects of the semifinal round. The impact for all rounds [columns (5) and (6)] is about 1 percentage point, although the standard errors are large and thus the effect is not statistically significant.
> So, in conclusion, this study presents no statistically significant evidence that blind auditions increase the chances of female applicants. In my reading, the unadjusted results seem to weakly indicate the opposite, that male applicants have a slightly increased chance in blind auditions; but this advantage disappears with controls.
> equal outcomes
Equal outcomes is a truly horrible and disgusting goal.
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The interview process is all about being biased against certain candidates. But what often happens is that the biases we hold when interviewing and working with candidates don't matter to the job but happen to exclude people who would otherwise do quite well.
It's not like interviewers are all twirling their waxed mustaches and snickering about how many women they've excluded. But what they do is listen to how someone describes a problem or how they behave during a whiteboard interview and interpret that negatively simply because it's different from what they were expecting. And so they don't hire the person because they're a "bad culture fit." Some women have been trained by our culture to use less assertive terms to avoid showing dominance in a discussion. And they tend to wait for you to finish before they talk.
Or suppose that the people at the company tend to wear a certain gamut of colors because they're all white and blue-ish and grey-ish colors tend to look better on white guys. So when someone shows up with a redder shirt that person might be taken as "too flamboyant" when in reality they're just picking a good neutral color for their skin tone. It just happens to be a significantly different tone from the rest of the office.
It could even be as subtle as discomfort with inexact or flowery speech. I had a lead who would get very uncomfortable when I would talk in metaphor and use metaphors and different words to describe things in terms that he wasn't used to. He would try to get me to tone it down. But everyone else on the team was perfectly okay with it so I kept doing it. That's another form of useless bias, because I was understood and could do my job but probably wouldn't have been as hire-able if I had talked like that during my interview.
My point and OP's point is that discrimination is frequently not overt. We have to look past these superficial differences and really think about whether someone can do the job. And we also need to be exposed to more candidates who are not like this. So a program like this stuffs the pipeline and gets us more exposure, and it's now up to us to challenge our existing biases and try a more diverse array of people out.
I assume Asian men are actually "white men" for the purposes of your example?
Thanks!
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/google-diversity-problem-in-...
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
If course it's also possible to overcome obstacles like these. Some people are very successful at doing so, but unfortunately others are not and shouldn't really have to.
Do you have any reputable sources for this?
Look, I get it, people turn you down for jobs all the time. I am a white male, and I HATE looking for a job in my non-mainstream market, because I am constantly passed over for being a generalist/introvert/socially awkward/you-name-my-worst-social-traits-and-recruiters-and-hiring-staff-hate-it. When I get my foot in the actual door, my bosses always LOVE my work.
If I wasn't a, you know, a non-protected demographic, I could just hop on the internet and whine about how these strangers are discriminating against me for my [protected status] and that we need to fix years of bias, when it's really that they binned my resume for being too weird, too non-specialized, too X for their tastes.
The basic problem here is that there are too many confounders in why a particular individual is denied a particular position, and it's way too easy to cry "X-ism!" instead of actually breaking down the hiring process into actionable feedback for everyone.
The way I see it, there is very clear gender and racial and other minority under-representation in some areas of tech and employment. Some of the reasons for that might be benign, others might not. It makes sense to me to poke at this problem and explore it and push against it's boundaries, obviously in a non-damaging way.
This seems to me to be a positive way to do this. If women going to coding camps typically find themselves in a small minority among a big room full of guys, that isn't necessarily ideal for them. It's not anybody's fault, it's not like anybody has done anything wrong, but it can be an obstacle for those women to overcome. So why not try to minimise that obstacle?
I think you summed up perfectly what causes people to have knee-jerk reactions against correcting biases.
Just because one effort doesn't address all issues at once, doesn't mean its futile.
Progress isn't instantaneous. It takes many attempts over long periods of time to move the needle. I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize any and all attempts at doing so.
So this is helping those who are already privileged, while the actual underprivileged are ignored once again.
The numbers are similar at other top schools, and feed into everything beyond, including startups.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
There's no data in the article about the income level of the students applying. Are there 15 times as many wealthy applicants? Disparity is often contextualized in terms of systems of oppression and discrimination. Individual behavior, influenced by the effect being poor has psychologically, is likely to contribute to the difference in economic diversity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469850
Still, your claim that nobody cares about the poor is not justified. Also, there are many just causes, and we can work on all of them in parallel.
The groups I was talking about, the ones that "nobody cares about" might not come to mind immediately, precisely because one rarely hears about them, but there are so many examples of disadvantaged people who are never the beneficiaries of such efforts.
For example: numerous physical traits other than sex or skin color. Invisible minorities like eastern Europeans or middle eastern Christians. People who grew up in rural areas.
It's probably absurd to expect to define categories and provide special help to every group that could be defined. Instead, people should be judged as individuals, each of whom has faced a variety of obstacles and benefited from a variety of privileges, and whose potential can only be evaluated by considering the whole person, not a few checkboxes.
@jl is literally giving money for living expenses for women to do this program. How does that help a rich or middle class woman more than a poor woman interested in the program? If anything, I’d expect the impact of $9K to be far greater for the last than the first (and presumably able to be treated as a tax-free gift or even if not, taxed at a low rate). If that’s the case, it seems more enabling, not less.
Jessica is giving people money directly to help them be able to participate.
Lambda School is also making the course work available for free.
Lambda School is not being paid by anyone, and no money is changing hands, other than Jessica literally giving money away.
Media changes:
* Don't show techs/ops and programmers as interchangeable in practice * Don't make techs or programmers look uncool * Show more diverse techs and programmers in roles * Don't dumb down smart female characters (some seasons of Arrow) * Don't turn smart female tech characters out of tech (Daisy on Agents of Shield)
Education Changes:
I'm not sure here, between K-12 vs >12, as I really think better normalization in media would go a long way. I also think actual gaming with broader appeal is helping a lot too.
I do find it interesting that given college women outnumber men by almost 2:1 that the majority of STEM and more specifically CS graduates are men. I think that colleges really need to look at their own practices here more and that cuts both ways. I find a lot of modern progressive feminist extremism to be far different than any classic goal of equal opportunity which is disenfranchising.
In media, a lot of the time all the roles in IT/Development are interchangeable and muddled and there's almost no insight into where one role might end and another might begin.
Perhaps at some companies but not at mine. We do deny employment on the basis of sex and race, in order to increase percentages of women and URM. It's not just including women and URM that would otherwise be left out. It's also about making that a significant chunk of qualified white and Asian males don't get offers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464944
Makes me think of Eleanor Roosevelt. She started by focusing on a group. But there were a lot of problems in her times and she recognized that, and she went on to tackle so many things like anti-poverty and unemployed youth.
I wonder if Jessica Livingston will do something similar, since it's written in the FAQ: "Since neither I nor Lambda School have tried this before, I wanted to reduce the number of variables. If it works this summer, we may expand it next summer."
Cool!
> ...genderqueer women...
I'm not sure what that means, but...
> ...and non-binary people who are female-identified.
Okay, what? Isn't the point of non-binary to not to be in the binary of man/woman? Can I identify as male, female and non-binary? Female and non-binary or male and non-binary? Male, female, female and non-binary?
The first programming task for these students should be designing the UI widget that appropriately records the "gender preference" of a user in 2019.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/women-only-tech-scholarships-m...
> Judgment was entered as follows: Judgment entered for FS ISAC Inc and against Allison, Rich ;Hamilton, James
https://unicourt.com/case/ca-sd-allison-vs-fs-isac-inc-86101...
Accountants, doctors, lawyers, all managed to closely guard their profession while we're opening up the doors to basically everyone and we think 'it's cute' when the janitor learns how to write web pages. People saluting this should check back in about 10 years to let me know how it goes.
Not be cause of women, of course, that would be a misogynist thing to say, but because of some completely unrelated and irrelevant reason.
yeah, right.
Anyone who learns pencil-and-paper addition and multiplication is actually following an algorithm, so you basically cannot even learn arithmetic without touching algorithms.
People need to understand what an algorithm is, because more and more circumstances which affect their lives will be determined by algorithms.
I fear if it's the latter, schools will be churning out code monkeys
More engineers means more widgets and platforms and shims and other NIH, so I am not worried about the sort of thing you describe.
All that matters is the quality of that web page. This is no different from the janitor also being a novelist or accomplished musician.
I wouldn't worry if I were you; most people will only ever learn enough to program themselves into a corner they can't get out of in a small number of lines of code, in some scatter-brained scripting language for imbeciles.
In the 1990s there were many complaints about a "right wing" culture based in the "computer science departments" of universities. This wasn't true, unless "right wing" means "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" and "critical of political correctness" but these attitudes are considered "far right wing" today. But compared to the rest of academia, computer science specifically, and STEM in general, were not as far-left as all other academic disciplines.
So, in order to diminish the economic prospects (and reproductive fitness) of American citizen so-called "white" males they encouraged affirmative action for non-white males, mass immigration of non-whites and visa programs like H1-B.
Then various so-called "white" male cultures in technology were demonized as "toxic," "sexist" and "racist" in order to further diminish their economic prospects.
This campaign has seen the cooperation of the economic elites and the "social left" - many who still pay lip service to various Marxist ideologies - to destroy the economic and social power of working and middle class American citizen "whites."
Google.com is the perfect example of this but it's endemic in Silicon Valley since the defense industry became less powerful there.
This campaign is written about quite openly, in rather explicit anti-"white male" terms, across media and academia. It's barely allowed to be criticized even on sites like this.
(The short version, though, is that (a) turning this into a race war about white men is obviously off topic, and (b) when people comment like this, they're essentially copying pre-existing talking points, which is neither thoughtful nor conversation.)
I'm generally against equality of outcome, and support equality of opportunity, which this is not.
Companies should pay women more then men to encourage more women to join the field. Laws should be made so that companies have to hire women because the bosses are misogynist.
Destroy the patriarchy! You go girl!
Don't you see a problem with too many men in CS? Don't you want more women to succeed?
I just checked your profile. You should be fired for being a woman hater.
Here's a test: ask yourself how much intellectual curiosity there is in your comment or your motivation for posting. If you don't find much, please hold off until you do. Intellectual curiosity is the reason this site exists [1], and it's a fragile factor nowadays amid the rage and hysteria online. Keep HN curious.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: mlevental points out that you were referring to the article, not my comment. I think there's plenty of intellectual curiosity in what Jessica wrote, especially in the blog post explaining why she did it. In fact, I'd say it's obvious. That commenters don't always respond to curiosity with curiosity of their own is a separate issue.
Certainly it's also a promotional post in the sense of wanting to call attention to the program, but that sort of mix is common on HN, and it's where it is on the front page because users upvoted it.
It's only disingenuous if she's lying about these things and actually not doing this, which seems like an absurd accusation.
The linked webpage does not spark my curiosity, it inflames me because I'm against any type of discrimination. Discrimination against men is sex based discrimination.
The webpage naturally attracts political and ideological flame bait and these kind of links should have no place on HN.
How can we simultaneously be an industry built on free an open source software and yet try to put up walls around our industry when efforts are made to make it more accessible to others?
The barriers to programming are being lowered and this is an excellent thing. More diverse companies, different types of people to bounce ideas on, new perspectives. This is what our industry needs more than ever, and yet so many feel a threat veiled by concerns of affirmative action and 'reverse discrimination'.
We need to acknowledge the barriers that have existed in our industry but may be blind to you personally because you never had to deal with it. For one, access to a PC for a long time was restricted to those with low incomes. My mother saved her income tax refund for two years to buy our first PC, the one I learned to program on. The schools I attended didn't have a computer lab until my junior year of high school. It's a great thing that programming is being spread to those who did not have access before. If software is eating the world everyone had better become familiar.
All the top comments I see are supportive and encouraging. Maybe there were some negative removed comments, but overall this thread doesn't seem to demonstrate gatekeeping and discrimination.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836
I think we might have banned a couple of accounts in this thread, but there would be a comment there clearly saying so.
I don't take any issue with boot camps that are exclusive to women, but I can definitely see how people are worried that it reinforces the general atttide that "white/Asian men in tech = bad, women & URM in tech = good"
Barriers aren't just being lowered. The're also being erected for some types of people.
When you rebalance scales, the side that was too high has to go down a little.
> When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
(Unknown author.)
"1. We only accept applicstions from candidate from non-traditional backgrounds if they're diverse. Diverse is defined as any of the following: women, black, Hispanic, or native American - maybe also veterans but I'm not sure. Non-traditional background means coming from a coding boot camp, or majoring in a non-computing related field. I think after 3 years industry experience candidates are considered traditional even if they came from one of those two.*"
Note that this isn't impacting those well represented in tech; a white or asian man from a middle or higher class background.
It is instead rebalancing the priorities of those lacking in representation. A white guy who had to drop out of school to take care of his family? Not interested. Asian woman who decided her previous field wasn't for her, and does a coding bootcamp? Come on in for your interview.
I'm not saying I have an answer, but this is a legitimate concern. Responding with a generic platitude about how OP is merely feeling the effects of losing relative privilege is I think quite belittling and inappropriate.
What about this situation makes you think that white and Asian men are privileged as compared to women?
The assumption that women are underprivileged in tech often does not hold up to scrutiny. Many studies have found significant bias in favor of women. When Google studies it's wages recently it found proportionally more men were underpaid.
Again in case you missed it, my company does explicitly deny employment opportunities to white and Asian men where they would have been hired were they women: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464944
Barriers are going up. Perhaps at the moment this is limited to certain places like San Francisco and silicon valley. But to say barriers aren't going up for white and Asian men is counterfactual.
And besides, I'm Cuban myself so I ostensibly belong to an "underprivileged" group (though I would be among the first to tell you that this is a BS generalization. I am not by any means underprivileged).
I think you are basing your opinion solely on anecdotes from your company/bubble.
Women are underrepresented in tech - just go any tech conference and see for yourself.
Are women not as smart as men when it comes to tech? Or are there barriers to entry for women?
When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19303039
Those are not the only options.
I wouldn't say smart because thats a whole other can of worms but generally less suited, yes absolutely no doubt about it. It's weird but outside of the SV-buzzfeed-vice-huffpost filter bubble it's common knowledge that most women would rather do anything else besides stare at a screen all day and do something that neither involves people or art in any way.
It's not exactly rocket science but somehow it has become verboten to point out what everyone across cultures around the world (ex US progressives) and even science can clearly see.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/899263...
I will say that in the past what I mentioned has been abused to keep out and belittle women who clearly WERE suited to jobs like this. The excellent movie Hidden Figures shows how wrong and sad that is.
But two wrongs don't make a right. Focusing on gender parity is also going to make for lot of miserable women pressured into careers that don't really suit them.
What fraction of companies would you estimate have policies similar to yours?
Public figures also agree. Bloomberg's Emily Chang - one of San Francisco's most prominent tech reporters - encouraged adopting explicit reservation systems for women. Even though this is totally illegal in the United States.
I'll admit that at the end of the day I'm only one data point and that maybe I fell in with an especially progressive group. But this is what I'm seeing.
A poor white boy from Appalachia doesn't benefit from whatever "privilege" young white men in the Bay Area might tend to enjoy as a result of their parents' success.
And you raise a good point. The acceptability of "learn to code" when it was directed at laid off coal miners, but sudden shift to unacceptability when it was directed at journalists is extremely hypocritical. White male coal miners who went to a boot camp would have their resumes rejected on the basis of their race and gender. The same would happen to many journalists, but a substantially larger portion of journalists belong to demographics from which we do give a chance at interviewing when they come from boot camps.
For example the American Association of Educators is trying to encourage more men to become elementary school teachers, where women are drastically overrepresented (It makes tech look like a utopian melting pot). By doing so, they're not saying women are bad, but they are saying the profession would benefit significantly from more male participation, particularly when addressing concerns specific to young boys who are more likely to struggle in school.
Secondly, I'd also disagree that about the general attitudes of folks pushing diversity initiatives. No one is trying to eliminate white and Asian men from the workforce. This is more about bringing people in, not excluding populations.
It's somewhat under the rug, but it's basically an open secret like Area 51. I explain in greater detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19465891
Again maybe it's a regional thing, but in silicon valley policies like these are pretty standard in my experience. In fact, many of my colleagues have called people racist and sexist for opposing these policies. These poilicies aren't just accepted, they're expected. I really don't think a lot of people understand just how social acceptable it is to discriminate against white and Asian men. Multiple managers have written in public email lists that they don't intend to hire white or Asian men for certain roles, and nobody took issue with this.
I get that inclusion of women and URM doesn't have to come at the exclusion of white and Asian men, but many companies are framing diversity in terms of percentages. That inherently puts it in zero sum terms. Everyone wants to have > 30% but there aren't enough women to go around. So the only way to achieve that goal is to deny employment to qualified men. It is indeed pursuing diversity through exclusion.
I get that having boot camps to get women into tech doesn't inherently cause companies to enact discriminatory policies like these. But saying outright that men are not welcome is a clear reminder that in many peoples' eyes, men's opportunities do not deserve the same protection as other groups. Replace men with pretty much any other group (except maybe Asians) and this situation would be outrageous. If we genuinely do believe in equality, then it needs to be just as unacceptable to do the same to men.
Also, who is putting up walls? Be specific please. I too come from a low income "unprivileged" family and got my first computer in high school.
And the tech industry has always been diverse. It has been the most diverse and the most meritocratic industry for a long time. It's the industry where minorities and immigrants like Jerry Yang and Sergei Brin can thrive unlike more establish industries like news, media, oil, finance, transportation, etc.
Why are you painting a false image of what the tech industry is like? There are no barriers to programming. It is the most available and meritocratic and fair industries around.
Also, your entire comment had no relevance to the article. You just went on a stereotypical virtue signaling rant.
Also, do you really want diversity, or do you want a "diverse" group of people who all think like you?
I just can't handle the hypocrisy. All over HN, you support H1-B visas and claim the tech industry's success is due to diversity provided by H1-B visas. And elsewhere, you claim the tech industry is not diverse and the problem with the tech industry is the lack of diversity.
Which is it? You can't have it both ways just to suit your agenda. Be consistent.
You might not realize it, but this is a strawman without linking to specific comments or providing some kind of examples.
You want "the other side" to acknowledge the barriers existed in our industry, and yet do not want to acknowledge that reverse discrimination directly hurt people. Being rejected for the identity you are born with hurt on a very personal and primal way.
Then we have cases like my own perspective. I have seen this kind of gender initiative for about 30 years now here in Sweden. Gender segregation in this industry has in the 30 last year gotten worse. I know for example a woman who took a "women only programming course" in the 90s, and she is now the single person left still in the programming profession out of every single person that graduated (she got a job before she graduated but that might be beyond the point). Study after study report the same where if a person belong to the minority gender in the work place, the risk that they will switch work place to one where they are majority is significant every single year. If I recall right it actually increase for each year, in particular after they graduate. Regardless if Men or women are the minority in the study, the result is similar.
The only effective measure I have seen to prevent this pattern is mentorship programs. I have not ready any in-depth explanation why they tend to work, through I strongly suspect it addresses some of the core issues behind gender segregation. An observation I made is that you can offer mentorship to both majority and minority segments of a group and the minority will more likely join and participate, which still focus the effort on the minority but does not exclude if any individuals in the majority have a similar need for the service. Obviously not everyone of that identify as belonging to the majority is identical and individuals have different needs.
1. no degree is required, not even a high school diploma
2. a Windows laptop can be had for $100 at a pawn shop
3. an incredible amount of programming tutorials exist for free on the internet, including a complete CS degree course from MIT
4. a business license can be had by just filing a bit of paperwork with the state
5. operating a business on the internet means nobody needs to know what sex/religion/age/whatever you are
6. programming tools and SDKs are available for free
7. you can work from home
How much more can one ask for?
In countries where programming pays well and there are no other better options you can see much more women in the field, like India or Israel, somehow those women who in many times comes from much more traditional and conservative societies, manage to learn to code like any other men. I wonder how they do it without all the affirmative action while popping out 5 kids per family or even more like the orthodox women in Israel.
It seems like modern feminism destroys the capability of women to learn anything that is not liberal arts, someone needs to research how that happened and how it is all men's fault.