The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.
It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!
Sorry for the rant…
It's not a gender issue. I would be looking to hire someone competent who works hard, not someone who makes "sacrifices" and then expects a job/promotion.
The latter never works. That's not the work culture in most places. I've seen it many times, people who make "sacrifices", allowing themselves to be exploited, expecting some promotion from it, and are then passed over for someone who actually has demonstrated they are good at the job and ready for more responsibility, and not being a doormat. Then they become resentful.
Don't be bitter. Be better.
The poster contends women are being prejudicially hired as "diversity" rather men who have "sacrificed" and worked hard.
"lolwut" indeed.
do you have any examples of this happening? or is this just a boogie man?
my experience has been different: so many mediocre men in this industry. all of the women i've worked with have been brilliant.
However, it is difficult to measure those positive traits for what they are, so employers are selecting based on gender hoping for positive correlation. But that's illegal, so "diversity" hiring was created as a scapegoat to help avoid legal fire.
have you ever heard of the word "bias"?
> Staring at logs in a terminal and sifting through endless YAML not so much.
i did not know that one gender could be better at this work. that seems like huge news if true.
and yes, you sound like a reactionary. coward ass throwaway account.
I see a lot of people online complaining about the job market and blaming all kinds of things for their inability to find a job, but I think what has changed is that there are no more defensive hires, where companies like Google hire as many people as possible just to deny their competitors those people. Lots of relatively unqualified people found very high-paying jobs that way and are now surprised that they can't land those jobs anymore.
If you're competent and personable and know your own strengths, you can still find a job relatively easily.
Coincidentally, I was fired during the tech downturn two years ago, and within a few weeks, had three job offers out of three applications. I have a good CV, I applied at local companies that matched my specific expertise, I asked how the interview would go and what was expected, and prepared specifically for each company.
Complaining about women because you can't find a job isn't just misguided, it's harmful to yourself, because it prevents you from understanding what the actual issue is, and working on it.
I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.
The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)
I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.
By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.
The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
To what end?
There is research that has shown that men are, on average, better at single-focus tasks. And, indeed, it was huge news at the time the research was published – at least as huge as being reported in major news publications is.
It wouldn't be huge news now. We quickly grow bored and tired of widely reported things from the past. Humans, of all genders it seems, tend to seek novelty.
You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism.
Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job.
I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.
If that's actually the case and not just a warped perception on my part, it could easily happen that, depending on your own skill-level and environment, you'll be more likely to work with one of the two groups in the bimodal distribution.
Another instance, Intel gave tens of millions to do something that few employees could have done in couple of months. Its basically creating two conda environments, one with intel optimized software stack & one with default and compare the results for 20 use cases.
Not sure its the case with all the contract companies, but this was my experience.
This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)
Who created and contributes to linux kernel, python, c, c++, go, python, ruby, ruby on rails, php, wordpress, ghost, SumatraPDF, zig, oding, nim, nodejs, deno, bun.
I could just keep listing major open source projects because I literally cannot think of a single one created and led by a woman.
And if you find one, it still doesn't negate the 100 to 1 ratio.
Open source, unlike jobs, are pure meritocracy. A woman can create a GitHub account and start coding just as easily as a man. There are no gatekeepers and open source contributors / maintainers are abused by random people as a matter of course.
To me it's reality. To you, somehow, saying that out loud is bias.
And to be clear: I don't think there's anything preventing women from learning to code and contributing at a high level and I've known a few that do. But for some reason they overwhelmingly don't. The stats are brutal.
I have seen women in the trenches but I don't see how that contradicts my claim that they are relatively few and there's probably a reason despite all the efforts to bring more women into tech.
edit: nvm i did about this entire comment thread: https://claude.site/artifacts/b1f6e916-a21b-420b-9081-dec62b... and specifically responding to all of your claims: https://claude.site/artifacts/401d407d-ef53-4cdf-84fd-cd79b5...
My 3 months experience searching - and getting only ~3-4 initial interviews - is the New-AI-Kids-on-Da-Block think software-engineering is just another plumbing for their Artificially Great Intelligence. One CEO even used the exact word.
waw. Plumbers make real good $$$..
Well when the discount plumbing they are getting put in starts to leak shit all over the place there will be a premium again in actually knowing how to do it properly.
It’s awful catching myself in a “I’m not racist but” situation. It really worries me.
It's very difficult to be a woman in Computer Science. CompSci is uniquely awful for women. Like other STEM, it's overrun by men, so you get all the subtle discrimination of that. But CompSci men also tend to be, for lack of a better word, asocial weirdos. Civil engineers have to work with people, CompSci people built up their skills in front of a screen.
All this means that the large majority of women are filtered out. The ones that remain are the ones most skilled with navigating tough situations, and who have a strong passion for engineering. A passion strong enough to wade through the downsides.
I also think they have to constantly prove themselves, which also builds up their skills.
Lately my bread and butter is fixing legacy game engines. I have yet to meet a ciswoman tech lead who can do this work.
I experience the other end of the spectrum. The skilled Indians that made it to Germany and write to me through my website are usually delightful people.
Consider just how different your experience of most countries would be if you just interacted with their people with the most imbalanced incentives. This is sort of what’s happening.
I my opinion all of those are racist.
But in the current woke public opinion it's not and only whites can be racist.
I would love if it was possible to label racism whenever it appears but it's not possible without being called a racist yourself if you are white.
Looking at sibling parent poster there mentioning Germany, a similar example would be trying to make rational arguments about Israeli conduct with regards to settlements in the west bank. Any German even thinking out loud about those would be labeled a Neo-Nazi.
In my opinion "the current woke public opinion" is almost entirely a bogeyman construction of primarily the US right wing media with trailing support from their UK, AU, and CA siblings.
It's rare (ie. never.) that I read in "left wing" media of any substance articles about the pressing need for kitty litter trays for Furry students.
It's disturbingly commonplace to hear of what can only be performative manufacted outrage about such things from the asshole tanning bowtie wearing media wing.
The conclusion is that the statement " in the current woke public opinion it's not and only whites can be racist" is very much a localised subjective opinion and not any kind of actual global truth.
localised subjective opinion and not any kind of actual global truth.
And yes in "NA" context, I can definitely say that it's not "right wing outrage" construct. It actually feels like this conversation is the perfect example now. I'm absolutely not a Trump supporter for example. Not even a republican supporter. But it's absolutely my belief that H1Bs (which primarily means Indian nationals) is a very detrimental construct for America. I would never in my wildest dreams mention this "IRL" in my regular social circles for fear of being labeled racist. I am actually struggling to write any further here right now without fear of being labeled racist. I absolutely want to avoid "being thrown in the Trump camp" as well. I absolutely abhor the kind of vote buying Musk engaged in for example. A million a day for a signature? WTF!? It's such a brazen thing for a person with money to do, it's against everything I always believed the United States of America, the leader of the free world, would stand for. But I guess I was just naive. The world is way less fair than I hoped it was. I do recognize that. I still hate it.
I'm not sure what exactly qualifies as a "legacy game engine", but given the small number of women who worked in comp sci when games were made ten or twenty years ago, and particularly in male-dominated videogame studios, I would naturally not expect to see a lot of cis women with experience working on these engines (or on related tech stacks) today.
This seems like a bit of a special case, rather than a general representation of women in software engineering.
I lived in Europe for a few years and didn't feel that same context as well - it wasn't almost assumed that white people were racist and anyone might be seen as racist regardless of their skin color or heritage.
plus the above poster mentioned how it's well known, "based on statistical evidence". so show us.
Don't give these people an inch.
My life did not change because you called me racist in this particular conversation.
If my regular social circle or work environment thought I was racist however, my life very definitely would change.
It does not matter whether I'm actually racist (by some imaginary objective standard) or what "the world" would think about me. Nor what might qualify or not qualify in some other part of the world and whether or not I was wild. What matters to each person is always their own current local reality. Whether they like it, whether it's fair, whether it makes sense objectively, or not.
I was slightly skeptical when I heard of this the first time. It sounds a bit like some post hoc justification for why they didn't get hired. But nothing about it sounds far-fetched, really. It sounds more like a natural progression and part of human nature. But still stinks for a lot of my friends/colleagues who can't seem to get hired anywhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...