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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you in general, but I'm curious how many would be "enough"?

A supreme court justice was asked the same question. I don't agree with it completely but think it's an interesting opinion.

>Rosen: Why is it good for men—as you said recently, there should be nine women on the Supreme Court …

>Ginsburg: No, I didn’t say there should be. The question was when will there be enough, so there’ll be enough when there are nine.

>For most of our history, except the times the court was less than nine, and the one time there were 10, they were, until Justice O’Connor, all men. And nobody thought anything was unusual about that.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/ruth-ba...

Perhaps Ginsburg's point was that 9 is definitely enough, but she's addressing what the smallest number for "enough" is?

The logic there is just terrible. Maybe her point was that even if eight women were sitting, we'd still be considering women candidates for the open seat? If so, it didn't come across in the text.

The way court transcripts read it often doesn't come across as very natural.

"enough" of a specific demographic in this sort of discussion usually means "roughly proportionate to that group's percentage of the overall population". this belief is held most ardently by those who attribute the difference in outcomes to societal pressures (as opposed to inherent biological differences). of course this is mainly relevant in the context of an entire field or industry and not a specific company's workforce (although if the company is big enough the lines blur).

Since the US has 10s of thousands of open developer positions which are going unfilled, then purely from a pragmatic "what would help the economy" perspective, a good lower bound on "enough" is "we are able to fill those open positions".

There is no such thing as a labor shortage --- only a mismatch with respect to salary expectations.

That's kind-of-true, but I think doesn't fit in this case.

I mean, let's take a hypothetical world - only one person knows how to program. You could say "there's no such thing as a labor shortage - just a price mismatch, she should be receiving one billion dollars for every line of code". But you could also say "maybe we should teach a few more people programming. And clearly, lots of software wouldn't get written, because its cost would be too high.

This is the "same" situation, only a bit more spread out. Maybe those 10k jobs legitimately aren't worth paying more for - that doesn't mean that, if there were more programmers and therefore their salaries would be lower, that software wouldn't be valuable. It's still a good indication that there's lots more to do.

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