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Comment by 30944836 | Hacker News Reader

I noticed the text of your comment ins grey, which means someone downvoted you. I disagree on first take of your comment, because QA to me doesn't represent a lower-tier of anything. It's a tech job. Women being in tech is good. Indian people being in tech is good. Will you share a bit more about your thinking? Why do you see this as being discrimination?

Sidenote: I once glanced around a team I was working on a few years ago and found most of the product/program managers were gay or lesbian. Didn't strike me as discrimination, since there are, of course, gay and lesbian hardware engineers, gay and lesbian software engineers... it just happened that we all found each other on a particular team.

So that's why I think that's what's going on here, but I'm eager to hear your thoughts, as they differ from mine.

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The comment is only at zero, it means nothing. I made no qualitative statement about QA being beneath anything.

Most developers equate QA is beneath them. I also think QA is just as valid and not beneath dev, but I have also held nearly every roll in modern software companies. How we view QA doesn't mean that is how the tech job market sees it. Pay is lower, qual is lower and at companies that have a sizeable Indian workforce, I have witnessed that QA heavily skews female.

I didn't even notice until I have been on interview loops with Indian men that I thought were nice and that I had professional and personal respect for and this weird tiger came out when it came to interviewing women (for dev roles) that didn't come out when interviewing men. This is just anecdotal, not all not all.

This comment itself is going to get flagged or downvoted, but I can't put a caveat on every sentence.

https://feminisminindia.com/2020/03/02/sexism-in-engineering...

> A couple of women who I knew had studied STEM subjects but had changed their career trajectory after graduating, explained the systemic sexism that women face in universities in India which deterred them from pursuing it any further.

And then I see those pressures in the hiring loop (for devs), we didn't interview QA, it would make sense that they get pushed into QA or get pushed out entirely.

Sexism in tech is much stronger than men realize, women are fully aware.

> equate QA is beneath them

I think the status quality of jobs is an interesting aspect of discrimination. Why do certain jobs have higher or lower status? If the perceived status of various jobs was flatter, would various discriminatory schemes (intentional or not) continue to operate? Would differences in income persist?

My hypothesis is that demographic clusters of people within certain occupations are in part affinity and in part discriminatory which operate as a yin-yang.

Another hypothesis is that the existence of under-represented demographic segments in certain fields of study/occupation such as STEM means that the over-represented demographic segments are under-represented in other fields. Changing representation has classically focused on importing under-represented folks into high status fields. This effectively overstuffs some fields which decreases effectiveness. A better approach would be to make the other fields more attractive/high status so that the over-represented demographic segments in fields like STEM grow interest in other fields.

My hypothesis has always been that job status is largely driven by compensation and difficulty obtaining the position. If these are the drivers, I don't know how you would equalize status without overturning the job market at Large

One aspect I've noticed throughout my career is that the engineering problems QE engineers face are generally more straightforward, with well-defined parameters, and common patterns. The skills required to be a successful QE engineer require, generally, less breadth and depth of expertise than some other disciplines of engineering. I think it's a natural landing place for people who know how to write some code, but struggle to view problems at multiple levels of abstraction.

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