Congrats on this new venture, looks fun.
What do you expect will be the effect of this on hiring women? Do you have any relevant data from microcorruption (what % players were women)? It'd be great if Erin could also chime in.
What do you expect will be the effect of this on hiring women? Do you have any relevant data from microcorruption (what % players were women)? It'd be great if Erin could also chime in.
However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job. I believe in this so strongly that I am dedicating the rest of my career to work sample testing and, eventually, training.
Getting women to play, though? I'm not so great at marketing, so still working on that. I am writing a blog post to go up later in the week that addresses some of the issues in hiring women, based on my personal experiences and those of my female peers. The tone of the post is as politically neutral as it can be. My hope is to draw out some productive dialog rather than piling on stink for flies. Specifically, vast majority of the people in my professional network, male, female or in between, are genuinely interested in addressing the "women-hiring problem," but they avoid any discussion of it because ... well, it's always covered in flies.
The challenge will be to make just enough of a stink that it draws attention and not flies.
That's a nice thought, though it rather presumes that the playing field is level outside of the immediate neighborhood surrounding the hiring process.
I think that neighborhood, though, is probably, while not without gender/race/etc. bias, overrated in terms of the proportion of that bias on the course between birth and getting a software job that it is perceived to contribute.
I agree that bias is overrated as a contributing factor to this so-called problem. But it is one we focus on because we also believe that behaviors can be controlled for and habits can be rehabilitated. There are a lot of narratives where the circumstances are very different but the dynamic is the same. Someone whose parents want them to be a doctor or lawyer who aggressively derail them from pursuing the arts. Some very intelligent kid growing up in poverty with no access to resources who starts acting out and ends up with a criminal record. A woman who is forced to take HomeEc in high school instead of trigonometry (me).
Taken in isolation, these narratives can be explained away. As examples of a larger pattern, they become flaws in a system that can be engineered away. There's a meta-bias, and I'm still searching for a way to describe it that doesn't trigger an emotional response. It seems that until we can have that rational, engineering-focused discourse to identify the not level playing fields of the world, cataloging their characteristics, finding what things can be controlled for and/or eliminated,... sigh I don't know how to finish that sentence.
You say it's a nice thought. I believe it's a nice thought. More people hope for it than do not. What exactly is keeping all of us who genuinely believe that it's at least worth a try to apply a dialectic method to the problem from banding together and attempting it?
I don't know.
Discerning invested participants from trolls might help.
I am sorry, but that is a line with a negative width: if you so much as hint that this may in part be the fault of males (as a whole or, even worse, individuals) pitchforks will be out. If you do not hint strongly enough that this is the fault of males (as individuals and as a group) pitchforks will be out on the other side. As a more personal point the sheer toxicity of those debates continues to shock me, even after spending more than a decade on the internet. Vi vs Emacs debates don't tend to end in treats of rape and/or genocide but "why aren't there more women in computing" almost always do.
This isn't to say that we can't draw any benefit from your writing, just be aware that of the things you can't say (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) this is the thing you can't say most.
BTW, Tom was great at Matasano on #1, and only moderately successful at #2. We get tons of people who aren't in the industry, but they tend to self-select to be young men. For an individual company, #2 is way harder. It's "easy" to fix yourself, but hard to fight the larger culture.
Starfighter looks to me like something that supports #1 directly (by allowing objective metrics), and enables #2. It's a way for people who aren't welcome into a field to dip their toe in without some roomful of young white men asking them illegal questions about their child-rearing plans. On the other hand, there's still tremendous pressure pushing people away, and it's a deep problem. Still, part of the puzzle and I (personally) highly endorse.
As to the numbers, I've been meaning to dig into the data, but Matasano's hiring as fast as we need to, so it's been hard to motivate myself to do so. Maybe once graduation season ends...