Sanctimoniously self-made | Hacker News Reader

Sanctimoniously self-made

baweaver.com

13 pointsbaweaver18 comments

By listing so much on a requirement, you may well be scaring off some truly brilliant people with a greater than average amount of modesty, a trait this industry sorely needs more of.

Going a bit deeper on this, men and women tend to have a very different threshold for applying to jobs when they don't meet 100% of stated requirements. If, when you look around your team and see a bunch of self-aggrandizing dudes, realize that is what your job listings and hiring processes are optimizing for.

OP here.

Which really gets me, and I mention it in another comment on site. It's probably a good portion of the reason we don't have a great deal of women in the tech industry.

They tend to have a lot more modesty on their resumes, and a nightmarishly disturbing amount of impostor syndrome dragging them down like cinder blocks. What's annoying is that without a woman on team, it legitimately feels like you're missing something.

Put simply, we think differently, and that manner of different thinking is critical to preventing some really unruly code and architectural patterns from happening. I get worried every time I see an all-male team because there's not that dissonance there to keep things more on the level.

It's worth remembering that the number of women in the tech industry tracks pretty well with the number of women in the tech industry training pipeline.

Granted, though it's a compounding problem. Even if they get out of College they end up with that type of hurdle.

You think that may be contributing to the issue with women in the college pipeline at all?

Given that the gender gap is observable in high school, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the language in job postings doesn't affect the decisions of your average sixteen year old girl.

There are a lot of men in the industry who come from an alternative training pipeline. Brash men without CS degrees (like me) have no problem applying to listings having "CS or equivalent" as a requirement.

And yet the net percentage of women tracks pretty well with that in the training pipeline. So perhaps that doesn't skew things as much as you might think.

I don't understand your (repeated) point. Are you defending the status quo? Are you claiming that nothing done in industry matters?

I'm saying that the gender gap manifests well before issues in industry can reasonably be expected to take their toll.

Which is not to say that there are not major problems in industry. Just that there are problems upstream of those.

EDIT: In other words, how you word a job posting definitely has an effect on who applies. It probably doesn't have a huge effect on the decision of a sixteen year old girl considering taking a computer course.

Got it. I read the story about applying to jobs with overbroad requirements more of a "glass ceiling" thing than a "glass wall" thing. Even if you've got a tech industry job, you might be less eager to try a lateral move.

> Put simply, we think differently, and that manner of different thinking is critical to preventing some really unruly code and architectural patterns from happening.

So, women are better at being organized? I've heard women complain about this exact idea, because they believe it leads to them being pigeonholed into the "secretary" role on a team.

> I get worried every time I see an all-male team because there's not that dissonance there to keep things more on the level.

Would anyone ever even say the same thing about an all-women team?

imo, this is just making the problem worse - believing that you need both "male and female energy" on a team. How about we just say that a competent woman programmer is as good as a similarly experienced man, and - surprise - able to be good (and bad) at the same things.

Having all of one type of thinking is a horrible idea. It leads to a certain amount of groupthink. The more diversity in a team, the less likely it is to happen.

You seem to be reading into it quite differently than I meant it. What I'm saying is that they think differently in some cases which can lead to more thought out code, and by result better architecture.

> The more diversity in a team, the less likely it is to happen.

If we're talking about strictly gender diversity, that's speculation. If we're talking about a diversity of past programming experiences, then you're correct. But you were definitely arguing that women can bring something to a project simply by their virtue of being women.

> You seem to be reading into it quite differently than I meant it.

I don't think so.

You're saying that men and women think so differently about programming that an all-women team can never be as good as the those-same-women-plus-one-man team.

I think you mean well, but what you're saying is damaging. And unproven.

You suggest that, at least regarding programming, there's man-type thinking and woman-type thinking. If that were true, there'd be an identifiable difference between programs written by men and women.

Gender diversity in a profession is desirable not because people have special gender-specific knowledge to bring to the table, but because they should just be able to be at the table, period.

I have a slight feeling I'm likely to talk myself into a hole no matter what I say on this matter.

Yes, there are overlaps. From what experience I've had at least, their opinions are valuable to me. Not necessarily as better or worse, but as coming from a different perspective.

> What's annoying is that without a woman on team, it legitimately feels like you're missing something.

If it were an all-woman team, would that also feel like it was missing something? Would a team with no trans people be missing something? How about a mono-racial or mono-religion team?

I'm not jumping on you, just wondering what kinds of things you notice when they're missing.

People in general have an inherent need for 'heroes'. This need for an idolized leader, the protector of all and the 'savior of humanity' has manifested itself across the ages and I don't think there's a need to enumerate the instances. This recurrent phenomena will not fade away soon. I'm sure that in many cases these self-made achievers have thanked and acknowledged those who got them there, whether in public or in private. The problem is that the masses want only one hero and can only remember one.

Edit-- This might be relevant: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-makes-a-hero-matthew-winkler

Interesting point. Really it seems to be something ingrained in our mentality that would take something truly significant to change.

I personally believe this is an evolutionary trait that has stuck with us across the cycles. I can't find scholarly articles that discuss this topic at the moment but I'm quite sure many have studied it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com