You Say You Want Diversity, but We Can’t Even Get Internships

"Why don’t I have a blog, or my own website? Because there’s so much harassment going on nowadays that I’m actually scared to put my thoughts on the internet."

That is a really telling line of thinking. The author wants to be recognized for "doing more than writing code", but is not comfortable being open about her thoughts on a blog? How exactly should that happen? "Anne" put this on your blog -- you are better off with misplaced anger than no blog.

"It’s a humiliating experience to witness that people have so much respect and admiration for an experienced male developer, but there’s no place for you because you’re female and a beginner."

That has nothing to do with gender? Seriously?

"It’s a humiliating experience to witness that people have so much respect and admiration for an experienced male developer, but there’s no place for you because you’re female and a beginner."

This is where I stopped reading.

Is this for real?

"It’s a humiliating experience to witness that people have so much respect and admiration for an experienced male developer, but there’s no place for you because you’re female and a beginner."

There's a lot of unfocused anger in this article (as there should be!), but I'm going to pick out a few things and respond to them directly.

It’s a humiliating experience to witness that people have so much respect and admiration for an experienced male developer, but there’s no place for you because you’re female and a beginner.

There's a big difference between "a beginner" and an "experienced developer". If the company isn't setup to handle the (relatively large) workload of dealing with junior/novice developers, of course they aren't going to be interested in you. The gender thing is, I'd like to think, not as big a deal as the author claims--if it was, well, to hell with those folks.

If you are a woman or belong to other underrepresented groups, it’s totally different. Besides being experienced you need to have a blog, website, GitHub account and contribute to open source.

I think that that is expected of any new developers these days...at least, that's what I'm looking for. Failing that, an honest explanation of why you don't have those things ("I'm working other gigs", "I do a lot of code at my company, but can't share it", etc.) would do just fine.

Why don’t I have a blog, or my own website? Because there’s so much harassment going on nowadays that I’m actually scared to put my thoughts on the internet.

So, the author isn't blogging because they are scared. I don't want to work with people that scare easily--especially in a startup. I want somebody with backbone, which the author actually seems to have seeing as how she blogged this. The argument of "because sometimes people on the internet are terrible and mean" is a shitty reason not to do something.

Why don’t I contribute to open source? Because I tried, and people were unwelcoming and even cruel.

This is the case regardless of gender, and even so there are a great many projects on Github that would appreciate even a little help with the docs. Sure, the Linux kernel or OpenBSD or whatever probably are harsh to newcomers, but there are literally thousands upon thousands of projects on Github or Sourceforge that will accept patches even in the form of an email and be thankful for the help.

It wouldn’t be so hard to establish bootcamps and let people learn for free so you can hire them afterwards or actually hire them as interns and mentor them, turn them into good developers.

Teaching is hard. Teaching without additional compensation takes a whole lot of passion, and those folks are probably doing so outside of work anyways. If I got a recruiter fee for every promising novice I'd run into that then flaked out on my, I could afford to teach full time and invest in my business ecosystem.

There's this idea that "If we just teach these people, we'll get something back and more developers!". Fuck that. We've seen firsthand that most devs we train--say, in Houston--just end up moving to other places, or flaking out before they finish three or four sessions.

Bootcamps exist because, unless they have money/tuition on the line, people suck at self-study. That's the naked truth.

It certainly wouldn’t hurt him to give one spot in one of his classes to someone like me, for free or a lower price.

No, it would cost him whatever the extra burden on the teacher would've been.