Announcing The Fog Creek Fellowship | Hacker News Reader

Announcing The Fog Creek Fellowship

blog.fogcreek.com

85 pointsjoshyeager40 comments

> Additionally, all fellows will have 1:1 pair programming sessions with their mentors. Fog Creek currently has a 0.4% acceptance rate for full-time developers; The fellows will be working with the best in the industry.

I understand what fogcreek was tryiing to communicate here but I chuckled at this as it flies in the face of something joel said about how everyone thinks they are hiring the top 1%

> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

On a more serious note....Congratulations to FogCreek, atleast they are trying to do something here rather than just complaining about it on internet forums:)

I was about to make a note of this but you found a much better example from co-founder's (sort of defunt) blog.

Fellowship?

It's my personal opinion, and it might not be very popular, but I've never seen a company making such ho-hum products being so pompous as Fog Creek. (Well, StackOverflow is great. But it's not a Fog Creek business per se, and it's probably more due to Jeff).

One might say 37 Signals, but 37 Signals has written New York Time best-selling books, created the most celebrated web framework of the last decade, and has a bunch of web products people love to use. Plus, I don't find them much pompous anyway, just good at self-promotion, which is a different thing.

Yeah, we use Kiln and Fogbugz at work, and they're not the greatest.

Honestly, I don't care if it's a male or female who does it, I just want them (especially Kiln) to work at an acceptable speed. Waiting 30 seconds for any given page to load gets old fast.

I just took a look at their 'About Us' page. It's basically "we're a software company, like startups, but we're better than those stupid startups because we're a real business". Sort of off-putting. I'm sure Fog Creek is a wonderful place to work, but when I visit an 'About Us' page, I want to read about your business, not a point-by-point comparison regarding all the ways you're better than some strawman caricature.

Great initiative. Reading Joel's blog was a fun and inspiring part of growing up in the programming world. As a woman in CS, I look forward to see this expanded to allow more of us to participate, not just NYC residents.

Great firm, but I still can't ever imagine wanting to (or being compelled to) eat lunch with the rest of my team every day.

Some places set aside work time, half a day per week, for "game playing". They provide a bunch of games. You're paid as part of your work to play them.

This is to get people out of their cubicles and away from their computers and talking to colleagues. It helps people have a break from a particular problem (which is often all they need to solve that problem). It allows people time to chat to each other, about problems they're trying to solve or just general stuff. You know that you're not interrupting someone's work during one of these afternoons.

So, if a company is going to force some social time this is probably a better way to do it.

I worked for a small company that did this. After the first few successful weeks, the high wore off and we would lose people to stress/pressing projects and the novelty of gaming at work lessened the excitement.

Crazy as it sounds, you have to manage this effectively to keep it from becoming "the norm" and losing people along the way.

You need from the top down, a continuing excitement so that each week's even is special.

Yes. Making it an every week thing would make it boring pretty fast. It might be more useful if done a few weeks every year or so.

I tend to agree. We also had weekly Friday lunches and even weekly tai chi which became almost a chore after only a few months.

I believe a good manager/boss should be keenly aware of the emotional state of his or her team, and plan accordingly.

The developers last company I worked at just naturally had lunch together almost every day. It wasn't mandatory and often some folks would go and meet friends or do their own thing for lunch, but overwhelmingly most of us ate together. Honestly, I really loved it. It really helped us to get to know each other outside of the work we were doing. It was also common for the non-developers at the company to also join us for lunch, which I thought was awesome. There was no sense of separation or exclusiveness.

Every day may seem like a bit much, but if you don't want to eat lunch with your team 3, 4, or even 5 days in a row, maybe you're not working with the right people...

>> "if you don't want to eat lunch with your team 3, 4, or even 5 days in a row, maybe you're not working with the right people"

Personally I like to get out a stretch my legs a bit during lunch. We spend all day, indoors, staring at a screen. It would be best for everyone to get a little fresh air a walk about. If I stayed in the office over lunch I would be much less productive in the afternoon.

Fine, but who says that can't be done as group :)

yep ... agree with this. The best teams I've been on (ie. best culture/fit/whatever) have always ventured out for lunch. Making sure we get away for at least an hour in the middle of the day made us more productive.

I work with whoever I'm paid to work with, tbh. That doesn't mean I want or need to spend my free time with them (which is what my lunch hour is).

> There was no sense of separation or exclusiveness.

Even for the people who didn't eat with the group every day? I notice that those people tend to get excluded over time. Not on purpose, necessarily. It's human nature to see things in terms of "part of the tribe" and "not part of the tribe".

> maybe you're not working with the right people..

This depends on a lot of factors. Even if you absolutely love everybody you work with, you may not want to eat lunch with them every day. For example, you work in an open office environment and see, hear and talk to them for 8-12 hours every day. Some would argue that, under those conditions, taking an hour in the middle of the day to be by yourself or to meet with people you don't see quite so often would be considered healthy.

On the other hand, if you all work in private offices 8-12 hours every day, then taking an hour and socializing with your co-workers sounds fantastic.

It was a small office. When people went for lunch they just yelled and anybody who wanted to join them did.

> Some would argue that, under those conditions, taking an hour in the middle of the day to be by yourself or to meet with people you don't see quite so often would be considered healthy.

That's certainly true, but I was more responding to the idea that somebody would actively avoid it. I definitely took a lunch by myself with my kindle not infrequently, but I certainly didn't go out of my way to avoid lunch with my coworkers.

If it's anything like it was at reddit, you're not being compelled. Each day an email would come saying "lunch is ready" and each day we would look at each other and say "time for lunch", and then all go sit down together. Sometimes we would look at the menu and decide to all go out.

It just sort of happened because we liked each other.

I work at FC and this is the way it pretty much works, except people rarely go out since our caterers are really good.

> except people rarely go out since our caterers are really good

Same at reddit. :) We would go out maybe once a month.

I work at the sister company, so things are pretty similar. We have lunch together and everyone participates (although it's not mandatory) simply because we all have our own offices, if we didn't have lunch together I wouldn't get a chance to talk to my coworkers face to face at all in a day.

It's a huge contrast from when I worked in an open-floor environment and thought of lunch as my "alone time".

I suppose that makes sense. For me currently lunch time is my "gym time".

A female developer I once employed was from Singapore. She told me that in Singapore there is no noticeable gender discrepancy in IT.

How accurate was she? I don't know. If she was correct, then it suggests that the enormous over-representation in IT in the US and some other countries may be due solely to cultural reasons.

That is literally the only thing that could explain the issue. We know that women are just as capable at the job as men. There is no biological reason. That only leaves culture.

Perhaps, but it's not necessarily "bad culture".

E.g women might culturally just prefer other jobs in the US compared to Singapore. If more women are into Biology or Math and less in IT or Physics in some country, it doesn't mean the said country's culture has to change to achieve 50-50 men/women in all professions.

The main issue is: what makes something a valid part of culture as opposed to a bad part of culture we need to change? Culture doesn't just grow from opression, but also from preferences, historical accidents, etc. Should we abolish Cosmopolitan and Men's Health and have everyone read the same magazine (say, Wired)?

I'm Singaporean and yes, this is correct. The whole gender movement in tech is really only an American thing. The whole help-the-minority-because-they-must-be-disadvantaged/affirmative action phenomenon is something unique to American culture and it's been really interesting to observe from a foreigner's perspective.

     In the past, we’ve focused on our intern pipeline 
     by recruiting heavily from schools with high 
     percentages of female students. We’ve hosted and 
     sponsored hackathons and events with a focus on women 
     in tech. We provide continuing education programs for 
     female employees who want to learn how to code. These 
     efforts have helped some, but it’s not enough.

This topic has become VERY popular of late and is considered by most people to be such a worthy cause. Can I be a voice of dissent?

If you've tried this hard to hire your fair share of female developers and you still haven't been able to do it, is it possible that trying to force it to happen may be the wrong approach? Perhaps it is the case that there just are not females who want to be developers at Fog Creek.

The problem with equality, even equal opportunity, is that it is not realistic (the world doesn't naturally provide equal opportunity) and it creates as much discrimination as it purports to abolish.

Ugh.. Disgusting. What about other disparities? This is a company that is famously elitist and now they seem to have jumped on this 'gender parity' bandwagon for brownie points.

Lets give more opportunities to the most mollycoddled social class ( white women) in the history of humanity.

This attitude is very pervasive on the internet, especially with amateur critics. Just because an initiative doesn't solve an entire problem doesn't mean that it can't help or isn't worth doing. Moreover, just because one group is more disadvantaged doesn't mean that the less disadvantaged groups (which are still disadvantaged!) shouldn't matter at all.

The idea that you have to solve the entirety of a gargantuan problem to be doing anything of value is stupid. Most gargantuan problems are solved with steps of progress, not sweeping changes. If we want diversity in our industry, we have to, step by step, start aligning the incentives for young people to get into software in ways that don't overwhelming appeal to white and Asian males. This is one (very) small step along the path.

Now, whether or not this fellowship will actually do anything to help women get into software is a different argument completely. If what you're trying to communicate is that you think this is just PR and won't actually accomplish anything, then fine--there are plenty of arguments that you can make for that stance, but you haven't.

I just don't think white women should be the first disadvantaged group that any company should go after. That just reeks of unoriginal 'me too' strategy. I might be totally wrong here but has FogCreek ever reached out to black and latino communities in social/economic ghettos ?

Sorry that merely stating this opinion gets people all riled up and offended.

Ctrl-F "white": 0 of 0 results

"Women" doesn't mean "white women", and as Haul4ss pointed out, all women won the right to vote in the U.S. years after minority men did.

While it's true that there were laws allowing minorities to vote in the late 1800's at the federal level, up until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 there was still institutionalized discrimination that made it difficult to actually do so.

More on topic, I think there does need to be more inclusion for women, and there are programs springing up now that are targeting women of all backgrounds which is good. However, there is very little, if anything, being done to target minority men.

I can only speak for myself as a minority male working in tech, but I feel that some of the same unfairness/injustices that affect women apply to minority males as well.

If these initiatives were really about helping out disadvantaged minorities, then you might have a point. But bridging the gender divide solves two problems that bridging the race gap won't solve.

The first is product sensibilities. While it's not better or worse, most women do think about things differently from most men. If a large portion of your customers will be women, it's really difficult to develop software that's intuitive and serves their needs if you don't have some female perspective when building that product.

The second problem it solves is keeping the best and brightest male developers in the industry. It sucks working in an industry where 90% of your coworkers are other men. When I was in school, there were a number of my classmates that switched away from a CS major simply because they wanted more girls in their classes. To a lesser extent, the same happens after people get into the industry and see just how few women they'll get to work with.

It may be cynical, but I think attracting white women to the industry is just as much about better targeting a rich demographic and keeping the white men we already have happy rather than it is about being inclusive.

Is this the same mollycoddled social class in the history of humanity that just earned the right to vote in the U.S. < 100 years ago?

Yes access to great schools, well informed parents with good jobs, all material comforts, red carpet welcome to STEM programs via scholarships. I call that mollycoddled.

I tutor a mexican kid both of whose parents are undocumented immigrants they don't seek out( out of fear) or even know about who to play the game, many of his friends sell drugs.

Shouldn't lower socio/economic background trump being a woman when we come up with programs like these?

I'm appalled that you do so little to help starving children in Africa. Instead you've put your efforts into helping the inhabitants of the richest country in the world.

</sarcasm>

Not jumping on either side here, but a lot of change can happen in 100 years.

Sure. But he's talking about "the history of humanity", and I'm certain you can show that women, even Caucasian ones, are hardly the most mollycoddled.

The hyperbole undercuts his argument. And he wonders why people get riled up and offended. :/

I've always been critical of positive discrimination, from a "two wrongs don't make a right" perspective. I've felt that programs should aim at providing equal access, not equal representation. Had you spoken to me a few years ago, i would have strongly agreed that this program was a bad idea, and more likely to stigmatize than to emancipate. I would have especially heckled it for arbitrarily benefiting one class of people at the exclusion of all others.

However.

My country adopted new electoral legislation a while ago, forcing politicial parties to put the same number of women as men on the voting ballots. I thought it was a silly idea and would lead to a decrease in the quality of candidates, and in the end it wouldn't help women get elected. Then something peculiar happened. Because all those women were on the ballots they became much more visible in the media, and because they were more visible they got elected. Because they got elected, they shook up the political establishment, and that in turn infused politics with fresh ideas, cementing the women's right to be there. After a while, it became so self-evident that a lot of women were on the ballot that the door was opened to other underrepresented communities, and the notion that only portly middle-aged white men could get elected flew out the window. It's gotten to the point that if you got rid of the law mandating it, there would still be a diverse cast on the voting ballots.

So, to conclude by making an actual point, while you can point at this fog creek initiative and see its flaws, and i agree it is a flawed program, you should give it a fair chance and measure it by its achievements. You never know what might come out of it.

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