That poor girl. My gf’s only female teammate quit last month and i suggested she start grinding leetcode asap. Could you imagine being the only woman on a team? Pretty strong indicator that something is very wrong there.
Eh, my team is this way, but it’s because we’re aerospace adjacent which further compounds the problem. The only woman on our team is awesome and everyone gets along great. No one has an inflated ego or feels the need to one up each other though, which tends to be the root of the issue in my experience. Lots of tech bros feel the need to put others down, and see women as an easier target unfortunately.
It’s the same thing with any kind of diversity. Not an expert, but anecdotally, it seems to work better if you start adding diversity at the top. At least people at the senior+ level are generally more comfortable being outliers.
I don’t think it’s necessarily an indicator of something wrong with the team. it’s not easy to hire women in this industry, there just aren’t that many of them. A team of 10 people with 1 woman isn’t a red flag, it’s unfortunately average. If we’re talking about a bigger team that’s a different story.
It’s somewhat easier if you hire immigrants. there are definitely more women devs from Eastern cultures than Western cultures.
You say this, but I’ve been on 5 two-pizza teams over the course of my career, and there were other women on every team except the 2 most toxic ones. My current team at a large fortune 500 is majority women. I realize this may not reflect the entire industry, and some fields may be more male dominated than others. But there are a lot of women programmers out there. You just need to pay them well and give them a good work life balance and they’ll work for you.
I do agree that there’s more we could do to attract women. The company I work for is known for good WLB so I don’t think that’s the issue. We only hire senior people every few years and I’m pretty sure we only offer market value, so it’s possible that is a problem.
That said, I think we actually have more women on dev teams than most companies do. Especially the back end teams, maybe because we have a lot more women in the engineering leadership there. It’s our FE teams, which are led almost entirely by men, where we have fewer women. So if we did start hiring again I’d really like to see us bring in more women at the top.
I’ve interviewed around 20 people since I started working here and only 3 candidates were women-- I don’t have any control over who the recruiter sends our way, so I don’t really know what kind of bias could be going on there. So it’s possible that’s a problem too.
All that said, hiring good engineers is really competitive and I think we do struggle against FAANG-likes already. Even though we have a lot of good benefits we have a reputation for being super boring and proprietary (think enterprise software like Oracle, but not Oracle thankfully), which turns a ton of people off. So it’s not easy to attract talented people to start with.
That poor girl. My gf’s only female teammate quit last month and i suggested she start grinding leetcode asap. Could you imagine being the only woman on a team? Pretty strong indicator that something is very wrong there.
Eh, my team is this way, but it’s because we’re aerospace adjacent which further compounds the problem. The only woman on our team is awesome and everyone gets along great. No one has an inflated ego or feels the need to one up each other though, which tends to be the root of the issue in my experience. Lots of tech bros feel the need to put others down, and see women as an easier target unfortunately.
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I think they meant men in specific in this case. I don’t know that there’s a huge problem of women being sexist against other women in tech.
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Are you suggesting it’s never about gender? There’s no such thing as sexism?
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Sexism isn’t about gender? What the hell are you talking about?
What I believe they mean is that you shouldn’t counter sexism with sexism.
While there are a lot of sexist guys in tech, not every guy in tech is sexist.
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If we want to reach parity, there’s gotta be some only woman at first.
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It’s the same thing with any kind of diversity. Not an expert, but anecdotally, it seems to work better if you start adding diversity at the top. At least people at the senior+ level are generally more comfortable being outliers.
I don’t think it’s necessarily an indicator of something wrong with the team. it’s not easy to hire women in this industry, there just aren’t that many of them. A team of 10 people with 1 woman isn’t a red flag, it’s unfortunately average. If we’re talking about a bigger team that’s a different story.
It’s somewhat easier if you hire immigrants. there are definitely more women devs from Eastern cultures than Western cultures.
You say this, but I’ve been on 5 two-pizza teams over the course of my career, and there were other women on every team except the 2 most toxic ones. My current team at a large fortune 500 is majority women. I realize this may not reflect the entire industry, and some fields may be more male dominated than others. But there are a lot of women programmers out there. You just need to pay them well and give them a good work life balance and they’ll work for you.
I do agree that there’s more we could do to attract women. The company I work for is known for good WLB so I don’t think that’s the issue. We only hire senior people every few years and I’m pretty sure we only offer market value, so it’s possible that is a problem.
That said, I think we actually have more women on dev teams than most companies do. Especially the back end teams, maybe because we have a lot more women in the engineering leadership there. It’s our FE teams, which are led almost entirely by men, where we have fewer women. So if we did start hiring again I’d really like to see us bring in more women at the top.
I’ve interviewed around 20 people since I started working here and only 3 candidates were women-- I don’t have any control over who the recruiter sends our way, so I don’t really know what kind of bias could be going on there. So it’s possible that’s a problem too.
All that said, hiring good engineers is really competitive and I think we do struggle against FAANG-likes already. Even though we have a lot of good benefits we have a reputation for being super boring and proprietary (think enterprise software like Oracle, but not Oracle thankfully), which turns a ton of people off. So it’s not easy to attract talented people to start with.