Hiring Sucks
medium.com
medium.com
I can't speak to the general case, only my personal experience as an applicant and early employee at 3 startups, but I can't count how many times I've been told that I wasn't a good fit (pre-interview) because I didn't have experience with parts of their tech stack, even though any developer worth hiring for those early positions should be able to pick up a new stack and run with it. Very little development experience is actually "irrelevant" to any given opening.
Well, most recruiters are promising you that they are "experts" in their field and will bring you the best engineers. And then nothing happens for weeks or you get spammed with crappy CVs which is even worse (waste of time).
I am a former programmer, now running coderfit.com in Zurich. I am doing tech recruitment for a couple of very early stage startups here.
I am switching to a retainer-based model where the company prepays me a third of the fee before I start working. Especially for hard to fill roles, for instance, no-name startups, this is a better strategy than just working on pure commission. So, if working with recruiters at all look for the ones that will offer this.
Also ask: "From ten profiles you send us, how many will we approximately hire?" When they can't answer, that is a bad sign.
In theory, yes, but in practice we see "he" used way more. The subtext is that it is a lot more noticeable when people use "she" precisely because the opposite is used so often in typical writing. It is a response to underrepresentation, only made more salient because of the recent political conversation surrounding women in employment.
Your reaction seems to prove the point.
And "they" is such a great concept in my opinion. Along with having neutral position name, there's no bias towards one gender. That is not possible in my native language, there would be different word for male and female occupations (think actor/actress, but for virtually everything).
In a perfect world, everyone would use "they." Some people consider it necessary to respond to the prevalent usage of gendered pronouns to reverse the gender in common usage for the purpose of inciting conversations exactly like this one. IMO it's working to bring gender assumptions from a subconscious to a conscious phenomenon, which is the biggest step toward dissolving the underlying assumptions.
I don't think it does. Markedness is much more universal in language and not merely affecting grammatical gender in indeterminate contexts. If "the point" in question is some kind of job underrepresentation, it would be more plausible that this pronoun thing is some kind of symptom of it if this indeterminate gender issue were isolated and recent, but the indeterminate gender is ancient (older than any jobs, in fact), and markedness in general is pervasive, so I'm not sure what it could prove about recent job issues.
Still seeing the forest for the trees.
The point isn't job underrepresentation in meatspace, the point is that the underlying assumptions about gender roles in employment are expressing and reinforcing themselves whenever the English language is written with a determinate gender as in TFA. And that determined gender seems to be disproportionately male to any perceptive reader. This betrays that the forces that engender (pun intended?) discrimination are operating in the writer and are reinforcing the worldviews of those who still hold such prejudices.
The causal relation between using this language and discriminating against women is not a direct one, but it's intellectually dishonest to assume on the flipside that no relation exists in anybody who does habitually use gendered pronouns in their writing.
Technically, the "norm" in IE languages that haven't dropped M/F distinctions (those that did include, e.g., some Scandinavian languages or dialects) is masculine in indefinite and interrogative contexts (feminine implies markedness), but since English doesn't really have a norm, it's more of a do-as-you-please situation.