Conversation

Programmer/software engineer friends, is it true in your experience that for your coworkers, hiring standards are lowered if they're women?

nope
18.8%
a bit/sometimes
18%
a lot/often
12.6%
not applicable/results
50.6%

4,044 votesFinal results

Aella

@Aella_Girl

this question brought to you by a friend helpfully suggesting I could go into programming as a backup job, and when I was like I don't know how to program he shrugged and was like "you have tits, they're desperate for anything with tits"

12:42 AM · Oct 30, 2021

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At big tech the hiring software manager will have competing pressure from upper mgmt to #1 deliver results and #2 have diversity. If they can pick only one though, they will pick #1. Although I’ve seen rare cases where they were told their next hire must be a women.

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and

But at the end of the day maybe they’d hire a women 90% as good. But if they can’t deliver software with their engineers, that’s going to be a big problem.

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I don't have direct experience but my friend who works in recruiting says things in this vein

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That's also the only requirement for getting into

's new school.

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I'd say yeah. There's like 40 people in my startup, only 4 girls and only of them is a developer. Others are HR, project manager and sales lead.

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The women hired at my old job didn’t know how to program either. They learned on the job. That was back when things were more loose than they are now, though, so it’s probably not like that anymore.

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lol. Frequently hear hiring managers complain about trying to find a female candidate to balance things out and not being able to find one-pretty openly describing a hiring preference But not sure prefs are so strong they'd take an unqualified woman over a qualified man

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side comment on "idk how to program": you definitely have the approach to be good at it with practice, the question is whether you'd find it enjoyable enough to be doing for extended periods of time

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FWIW I’m 99.99% sure you could learn programming and be an excellent programmer. With your interest in survey research and current analysis skills, I’d recommend data science as it would build on those.