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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> As a positive point, all the females in our cohort got dev jobs, including the only one who actually failed the class. Startups are pretty aware of the gender discrepancy and actively looking to hire those with double x chromosomes. Not complaining about affirmative action, just wanted to give you as full picture as possible

You should be complaining! Especially given the rest of your story.

This kind of thing is such bull shit.

Before you down-vote me: a man passed and now works at Trader Joe's; a woman failed and got a software engineering role.

Reverse those genders, and if you're outraged, have a think about whether you should still be down-voting me.

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Please don't turn thoughtful conversation into angry ranting on HN, especially not about classic flamewar topics. It takes the site in exactly the opposite of its intended direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741232 and marked it off-topic.

> Please don't turn thoughtful conversation into angry ranting on HN, ... [we have] marked it off-topic.

I understand your decision. Respectfully, though, I think this sub-thread about the relative prospects candidates (and how it relates to culture more generally) is on-topic for the discussion here on considering enrolment in coding 'boot camps'.

As always however, your call. :)

Maybe the women just hustled harder. I know that was the case in the program I went through. 30 of us passed; 3 were women. All 3 women and about 20% of the men got good industry jobs. However, I and the other two women were hustling for jobs, sending resumes, networking and going to interviews 6 months before graduation. Most of the men, assuming they were telling the truth when I casually asked them about it, didn't even start to write their resumes until the resume-writing workshop during the last week of school. Of the men who got jobs, one was given a position by his brother who had a hip startup; 3 showed up to a FAST consulting recruiting event and all three got hired there; one already had a degree in software engineering and a job waiting for him at his old employer; and several others went back to their old jobs as well.

"One already had a degree in software engineering..." There's a whole other issue right there.

You can conclude whatever you want from it, but in this case the gentleman in question had a good government job with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, where he still works, as far as I know. He left his job temporarily to take a 2-year programming diploma on top of his software engineering degree. I don't think he did it to get a job since he already had one. It was more that his whole department was on the chopping block under the previous federal administration, and he thought it would be wise to get off of their payroll for a couple of years to avoid losing his job altogether. As far as I can tell it worked, as the federal administration has changed and he still has his job.

I promise, there wasn't any sexism involved.

Sorry, I was not being clear - I wasn't thinking of sexism, but what a person with a software engineeing degree was doing at a programming boot camp. I realize that software engineering is not programming, but if the term has any meaning, I would expect anyone with such a degree to know enough about what it takes to make software as to be able to pick up common languages by self-study. Your reply hints that his attendance at boot camp might be as much about certification and documented hands-on experience as education.

Ah, I see. Yes, you're right. I wondered what he was doing there myself. The "keeping my government job" story was reasonable, but you'd think he could have found a private industry job easily enough.

It's entirely possible that the women just hustled harder, thus explaining while all the qualified ones were hired.

The problem is with the one who failed the class. What do we know about her? We know that she either was too lazy to pass the class--implying she doesn't hustle--or she is simply unable to pass the class, implying she isn't qualified.

Combine this with the current political climate, in which a company looks like its trying to solve problems if it employs more women; and the fact that women joining male-dominated fields tends to cause a reduction in wages in those fields, and the fact that this seemingly unqualified and/or non-hustling woman was hired while many men were not, and its suggestive of a gender bias.

That is not to say the other women who were hired aren't qualified or don't deserve those jobs. Merely that there may exist a gender bias which is problematic in that it is focusing a particular outcome (equality of gender) at the expense of economic sense and efficiency; not to mention the personal expense of the qualified men and also at the expense of the unqualified woman who, if such a bias exists, is really being exploited.

It's also possible that she had qualifications in the industry she was hired for besides web design. It's not suggestive of bias at all - it simply tells us that there's something about the candidates that we don't know.

Anything is possible, but gender bias seems a much likelier conclusion than that she was hired as a dev because she has skills other than dev.

> Maybe the women just hustled harder.

Doubt that explains it.

I went through a large software development course, about 70 people. 60-40 male-female. Was a positive experience. The women all landed jobs instantly. As in, the day the camp ended, they all had jobs. The men, mostly, did not. It took months and multiple interviews for the men to get hired.

The demand for female developers is higher than the demand for male developers. (not that the demand for male developers is low). This doesn't particularly bother me, but it does appear to be a thing.

The way I look at it, most of the personal attributes that get you an entry-level job will end up having nothing to do with how well you will perform in that job. Gender is just another one of those.

40% female? That's extremely high. Wonder how they accomplished that.

That seems like a reasonable ratio considering that bootcamps are a popular way for women to break into the industry.

No, it is not a typical ratio. Bootcamps often have cohorts where there are 10 percent or even fewer women. For a bootcamp to have 40 percent ratio is impressive and unusual. Also - remarkable for all women to have a job at graduation. The bootcamp described sounds very unusual and the numbers are so very different from industry standard - that I encourage anyone reading to do their own research.

Which sites do you suggest for research?

I suggest talking to most recent grads of a program as things change all the time. For example, schools which previously had good placement may hugely expand number of cohorts - and not scale out job-finding resources or company partnerships.

Maybe so. But your experience is slightly different from what I'm objecting to most - which was a woman failing the programme and getting a development job, while men passed and no jobs or irrelevant jobs.

No amount of hustle puts a candidate that failed a 'boot camp' above one that passed in a merit-based evaluation.

Unless she got hired in an industry where she already had experience, and the bootcamp qualification was only tangential to that.

I observed 3 things about women in boot camps that explain this phenomena outside of affirmative action:

1. They are self selecting to jump into the known gender gap in engineering.

2. Perhaps due to 1, they generally came from STEM backgrounds in great universities (Stanford, Michigan, UCLA, etc).

3. They had better final project presentations and projects than average. Perhaps due to 1 and 2.

If they were driven, had a previous math/EE/mech E degree from a top university, and a great GitHub project why wouldn't you hire them?

> If they were driven, had a previous math/EE/mech E degree from a top university, and a great GitHub project why wouldn't you hire them?

The woman in the example given in this thread failed; so certainly wasn't 'previous...degree from a top university' calibre.

To be absolutely clear, I'm not in anyway 'against success' for any woman. The sort of merit-based hiring you described is exactly what everyone should be doing.

But if candidate A is better than candidate B: hire candidate A! Whatever their gender, or fit for whatever other quota; scrap the damn quotas and targets.

The only targets should be relevant capabilities, traded off against cost of course.

> This kind of thing is such bull shit.

> Before you down-vote me: a man passed and now works at Trader Joe's; a woman failed and got a software engineering role.

There's no reason to be outraged by a single anecdote. There are dozens or even hundreds of factors that qualify a person for a job beyond both their raw coding skill and gender.

If someone is taking a job at Trader Joe's because they can't find a programming job, there's a good chance there's a reason for that.

He said his cousin was female so I just wanted to highlight a positive for her.

But you bring up a good point.

one of my female friends who is from the same class as I and is less proficient than me on almost all levels is getting inundated with offers from any tech company of her choice. Meanwhile, I barely get a callback from the recruiter, some of them pomise to call at certain time and never call, adding insult to injury.

Kind of infuriating given both her parents are practising physicians and her whole education was completely paid for, unlike most people who have student debt staring them in the eye.

I downvoted you for being smart enough to expect downvotes, but not to see the first, most absolutely obvious rejoinder to the facile argument you presented.

Sample size of 1 each way? Sure, I suppose the quote just encapsulated something I frequently see, and think is beyond idiotic.

I'm young enough that the world I see being prepared for those not that much younger than me is, I think, going to be completely reversed from the motivation for the change.

I've tried to sign up for (technical) events and talks at my university because they sounded interesting, only to be told 'this is a women-only event'.

It would never even occur to me to hold a 'men-only talk on the latest foobar technique'; I suspect if I did, and refused to change my access policy, I'd be widely disparaged and perhaps kicked out!

Equality - fine. Positive discrimination is just discrimination, and at some point it will be 'traditional, negative' discrimination.

It's like the equality v equity cartoon - only the smaller box doesn't exist, and the middle-size child isn't short enough to qualify for a box: http://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-equ...

> Sample size of 1 each way?

That's not even it. Not only is it a sample size of 1, you are responding to a situation you know nothing about. Why did she fail? You have no idea, because it's not even your own anecdote. The fact that you're willing to jump in with "that is such bullshit" without even having the barest picture of the situation shows that your response is 1% motivated by the anecdote and 99% from your own biases and emotions about the issue.

In other words, your response says more about you than about the story.

It's called "positive discrimination" for a reason. We're positively discriminating to the benefit of women (or minorities, or whomever) now, to make up for the decades of negative discrimination that these groups have suffered.

Don't think it's fair? Interesting feeling, eh. Not very nice, eh. Be glad you haven't suffered it for literally your entire life.

Something seems off to me intuitively about "positive discrimination", as you've described it. It doesn't really seem fair to be unfair to an individual because, in the aggregate, that individual's group has been unfair to others in the past (and even the present). Sort of feels like an emotionally charged way of righting the wrong, rather than a rational one...or even an effective one.

This remembers me of how germans has to hear quietly about their nazi grandparents.

Given Male 1 and Female 1 wherein female 1 was unfairly discriminated against. How does it follow that if you unfairly privilege female 2 in favor of male 2 that you have somehow made up for the original injustice.

A rational though process would be that this just adds to the sum of injustice in the world.

I'm perhaps presuming to much but with a name that begins with Jen which is often a short or familiar form of Jennifer I would have to wonder if you yourself are in favor of "positive discrimination" because you yourself have suffered from plain old discrimination the bad and in fact only form of discrimination there is.

They're my initials. I'm a 40 year old white English guy called John.

I believe my life thus far has been tremendously more easy than a 40 year old black woman's would have been. Do you disagree?

Edit: here's a concrete example. I've basically been offered every job interview I've gone for. I'm good at my job, no doubt, but in some of those cases I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been the strongest candidate.

But - forgive me if I sound like an asshole, I'm trying to make a point - I'm charming. I'm white, I smile, I dress well, and that makes me safe. I'm a safe option. Unsure who to hire? Hire that nice white guy.

This is the systemic, subliminal discrimination that positive discrimination is trying to address. I shouldn't be the default option just because I'm the white guy. I've had my time. Let's give the "hey we're not sure, so if in doubt hire the black lady" option a go. Fuck it, it can't hurt.

Now, I do absolutely disagree with PD where it favours a clearly inferior candidate just because of their race/gender/etc. That is clearly wrong, and gets people upset, and I see why and I agree.

It's a nuanced issue. But if you deny that there's an issue, or try to sweep it under the carpet, I believe you're being disingenuous at best.

None is denying that there is a problem.

But people are upset because there is a PD that is favouring inferior candidate. In this case woman who failed. Of course a lot of assumptions, but still it looks like this.

If its not favoring the weaker candidate its not discrimination positive or otherwise its plain old judgement. You are saying that you are in favor of discrimination or somehow used as a sort of tie breaker which is kind of silly frankly.

I would fire someone for hiring based on a physical characteristic (for knowledge work). It's idiotic. It sounds no better than random.

If you can distinguish it from the average, then it's worse than random (that is, going with or against the average case uniformly at random).

> I believe my life thus far has been tremendously more easy than a 40 year old black woman's would have been. Do you disagree?

The "funny" thing is that we are heading to a situation where the "positive" discrimination in favor of women will affect the weak side, the black/brown man, and they are not privilleged, of course. Now we have double negative discrimination.

BTH, if it wasn't so common for women to waste lot of hours everyday with cosmetic and aesthetic stuff, they would have more time to study computers and suffer less harassment. Win-win.

>Be glad you haven't suffered it for literally your entire life.

Modern feminism increasingly seems to be an ideology based on the idea that women are always victims.

You've just described positive discrimination, and implied that you think it's a good thing.

Then you imply that you think women suffer unfairness for "literally your entire life". Which is it? You've either been a victim your entire life or you've benefitted from positive discrimination, in which case you probably need to stop acting like a victim.

The idea of giving someone an unfair advantage because someone like them possibly had an unfair disadvantage is ludicrous.

Based on your logic, in a generation from now we're going to have to start positively discriminating in favour of men, to make up for the fact that men are currently being discriminated against.

I understand what you're saying. To dig into it a little more, do you think there is structural (as opposed to intentional) gender discrimination, and if so, should it be corrected? Please don't hesitate to answer "no" if that's what you believe. My goal in conversations like this is to better understand each other, not score points or make judgements.

If it should be corrected, what specifically (i.e., what implementation) would you propose to do so? This whole issue is so contentious that I find people don't get much further beyond the surface disagreements.

No.

At least in my country, all of the ways that females can be discriminated against in the workforce that are usually brought up are illegal.

(Pay gaps for the same work, promotions, sexual harassment, etc)

Yet people still complain they are problems. At this point, the onus is not on the rest of society to continue to try and make things easier for literally more than half the population. The onus is on the people being discriminated against to actually stand up for themselves and aggressively puruse legal action if they are the victims they claim to be.

For me personally, I find it quite ridiculous to hear people talking about all the gender stereotypes that exist today (and the discrimination that comes alongside them) and how we need action action action to solve them as if they are still problems.

My dad cooked more than my mum. I was picked on by girls at school. The girls always were told it's fine if they wanted to play a sport more dominated by guys, but god forbid a guy try to play sport with the girls. Rather than being discriminated against, the girls I know who went into software got given hugely preferential treatment over the guys and are routinely given better opportunities.

In everyone's effort to undo gender discrimination, they've forgotten that the aim is not to swing the pendulum to the other side, but instead to bring it back to the middle and treat people on their own individual merits.

At least in my country, all of the ways that females can be discriminated against in the workforce that are usually brought up are illegal.

For the sake of comparison, what country are you referring to?

Australia. It's all covered under the Sex Discrimination Act.

https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/sex-discrimination/p...

Most importantly, I think that even if structural discrimination exists, artificially penalising other people is not the way to rectify it.

On whether structural discrimination exists, the question feels like a trap (even if not intentional) since we could probably spend hours arguing about what "structural" actually means.

But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, in general, I don't think it does exist anymore, in the western world. Gender discrimination against women is now both socially taboo and illegal. And yet this perceived victimhood is increasingly used to justify very real (and openly practised) discrimination against men.

We're going to raise a generation of young men who are continually told how "privileged" they are, while feeling anything but privileged.

Thanks for taking the time to address the questions I raised.

the question feels like a trap

Would you elaborate as to how you mean, in particular how I could have phrased it better? I sometimes struggle with how much qualification is necessary when posing questions like this: not enough and a question can come across as pointed, too much and it's just tedious. I'd like to strike the right balance.

One issue your answers do point out is that in this discussion you and 'jen729w are likely working from different premises: I doubt 'jen729w would be talking about positive discrimination if they didn't think there was some sort of discrimination occurring that needed correcting. Given that, disagreeing over solutions is likely inevitable, as you disagree there's discrimination that needs to be corrected for at all. I think it would be better to be upfront about that, so you can either figure out a common understanding you're working from (whether or not there's an issue with discrimination to be solved) before discussing any issues with potential solutions. For example, there's no reason not to ask 'jen729w what their understanding of the problem is. I think this kind of problem happens quite often when discussing contentious issues, which is unfortunate because I think it tends to make the issue worse rather than better.

Thanks again! I appreciate it.

Not the right mindset either. Positive discrimination is actually negative for the groups that you are leaving out.

Just focus in looking for candidates that are objectively competent at what they are supposed to do and fit in your culture. If you do it in an unbiased way then most groups should be represented.

Have you heard of the Equal Employment Opportunity commission? call them and tell them about your positive discrimination idea, they will surely like it... since you are in violation of EEO laws (sex discrimination = preferring females to males is as illegal as preferring males to females).

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm

If you do, you will have a hard time proving that setting higher requirements for male employees is not unfavorable discrimination against them.

That's nonsense. It's illegal to discriminate based on gender.

Your idea of a "make good" policy doesn't align with the laws nor does it make sense to punish people that have nothing to do with any prior discriminations made against the group you are advocating breaking the law for.

> It's illegal to discriminate based on gender.

And yet, it's only seen as a problem if it's to favour the incumbent advantaged.

Men can suffer from discrimination too. You sound like you read some bad, echo-chambery stuff TBH.

Alt view: for at least the last 500 years of Western civilization, women have always had a more comfortable and safer life than an equivalent man living at the same time and of the same class. Men died in wars, suffered injury and death in jobs, etc.

There's money in software development and women want it.

Note the lack of "positive discrimination" for jobs like coal mining, or any other profession on the top ten most dangerous jobs..?

> Note the lack of "positive discrimination" for jobs like coal mining, or any other profession on the top ten most dangerous jobs..?

You don't even have to go to the 'top ten most dangerous' - when did you last see a female plumber, electrician, gas technician, builder?

I was recently telling someone (female) that I was waiting in for an electrician. I said something like 'so when he comes', then said 'or she, sorry I don't know' - but then I realised actually, you know what I do know, the electrician is going to be a man and not because it's so hard to 'break into', but because women/feminists don't care about doing it.

Of course there are similar examples the other way around - male nurses or primary school teachers are examples to a lesser extent.

It's not really a problem, but we should at least be honest about what we mean.

> Be glad you haven't suffered it for literally your entire life.

I am. I'm young enough, though, that I'm acutely aware that the roles are going to be completely reversed for men not that much younger.

I've been unable to attend technical talks at my university that sounded interesting, because they're 'women-only'. There are exclusive events, clubs, networking for women - but of course there aren't equivalents for men! Disassociate yourself from the poor fool who dare suggest such a horrid thing!

I'm all for equality, but manifestly not for 'positive discrimination'. At some point, the tables will turn, and the generation of men below me will perhaps have this feeling of having 'suffered it for literally [their] entire life', and will want to positively discriminate back.

Or, we could just consider people on their merits, rather than their gender. Y'know, what women say they want?

I'm all for equality, but manifestly not for 'positive discrimination'.

Control theory-wise, perhaps it's demonstrably impossible to obtain the former without some measure of the latter, unfortunately.

My car pulls to the right slightly, I turn the steering wheel slightly to the left to adjust. We do that in society, folks start to complain. I have to suspect they're not out to fix society, but rather to preserve their good position in it.

Or instead of a band-aide solution you could just get an alignment and solve the underlying issue.

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