William of Occam

Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They’re Better — PBS NewsHour

An academic says that Silicon Valley is “not a meritocracy.”

He doesn’t offer any evidence to support that. He just looked around and noticed more men than women in the high-tech workforce.

The fact that there are more members of Group A doing X than there are members of Group B doing X is not evidence that members of Group B are being discriminated against in their efforts to do X.

In particular, he says that only 3 percent of tech firms in the Valley were founded by women, as though founding a tech firm is a fun thing that everyone should want to do.

Founding a startup is an ultra-high-risk activity that requires insane amounts of time and sacrifice. Do you want to have friends? A social life? Do you have a family? Do you want to have a family? Do you want to see them sometimes?

The fact that more men than women are founding startups is not evidence that women are being discriminated against. The simplest explanation is that women just don’t want to do it as much as men do.

From an actual job ad:

Killer, Profitable, Stable and cutting edge technology company looking for genious!!!

It’s funny when someone misspells the word “genius”!

Why are random words like “Profitable” and “Stable” capitalized? Because the recruiter wanted to highlight the adjectives? Then why isn’t “cutting edge” capitalized?

Why isn’t “cutting edge” hyphenated?

I’ve worked with some great IT recruiters but they’re the exception, not the rule.

I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn recently as part of a job search, and it doesn’t make you feel good about IT as a serious profession when you see how many IT recruiters are former waitresses, bartenders, shoe salesmen . . . honorable professions, but not likely to give a person a good understanding of technology and the people who work with it.

Here’s a sample phone conversation I had with a recruiter:

“First question,” the recruiter says. “Do you have any experience with software development? Because that’s key for this position.”

“Uh, that’s all I’ve done for 25 years. Are you looking at my résumé?”

“Yes, but I don’t see anything about software development.”

“Are you sure it’s my résumé?”

“Yeah . . . I don’t see anything that specifically says software development.”

I’m speechless because this is clearly impossible.

“Hang on,” I say, ”I’m going to bring up a copy of my résumé here. Okay, let’s make sure we’re looking at the same thing.

“Developing and maintaining a portfolio of enterprise web applications on ASP.NET. That’s software development.

“Designing and implementing business-critical web services in .NET environment. That’s software development.

“Design and implementation of multiple concurrent ASP.NET projects on high-volume customer-facing websites. That’s software development.

“Granted, we haven’t seen the word ‘software’ followed by the word ‘development’ but that’s what all of this is, right?”

(I may as well stipulate here that IT practitioners are a pretty bad bunch themselves when it comes to lacking appropriate skills for their work.)

Because of the huge productivity differences between good programmers and bad programmers — 10x? 28x? More? — my biggest leverage point as a development manager is my ability to hire people.

At my last job, we had an HR Director named Lucy. In every one of our annual Employee Satisfaction Surveys, Lucy’s group had the lowest scores in the entire organization. Nobody liked or respected her.

She was, however, close with the CEO, which made that irrelevant.

Lucy’s friend Kathy Slauson runs the Slauson and Slauson recruiting agency, so that’s where we got our programming candidates, who were mostly terrible.

The Slauson agency doesn’t specialize in IT candidates, although they do have a “technical recruiter,” who unfortunately knows nothing about technology.

They don’t bring candidates in for in-person interviews. They take whatever candidates give them in the form of a résumé and they pass the résumés along to clients like me in hopes of being paid a fee.

1. Candidates send résumés to Slauson.
2. Slauson sends them to me.

What value does this add over candidates sending résumés directly to me? None.

Slauson doesn’t qualify candidates. They don’t map abilities and skills against the requirements of a position. They add no value to the process, and I had to screen all the résumés myself, the same as if I’d just bought them from a job board.

When I saw that Slauson was just going to throw résumés at me, I asked them to please add a short write-up, indicating why they thought each candidate was a good fit for the job.

What I got was write-ups like “Candidate is good with Technology X,” where Technology X is something I indicated as a job requirement.

When I asked “How did you assess that the candidate is good with Technology X?” they would tell me “We asked him.” Or “It’s on his résumé.”

In other words, “Candidate is good with Technology X” meant “Candidate states that he’s good with Technology X. Unverified.”

(If you’re wondering at this point why an HR department would funnel good money to a recruiting agency for doing nothing, go back and reread the part where I mention that Kathy Slauson is a personal friend of Lucy the HR Director.)

I said earlier that Slauson has a “technical recruiter.” She was in the office one afternoon and handed me a résumé.

“He doesn’t look like an ASP.NET programmer,” I said after looking it over, “which is what we’re looking for. For example, I don’t see any C# experience.”

“It’s right here,” she said, pointing at the résumé where it said this: C++.

If you’re not a programmer, you might say, well, easy mistake to make. C# (pronounced C-sharp, like a musical note) and C++ (pronounced C-plus-plus) are both programming languages containing the letter C followed by one or more symbols.

But whereas C# is the primary programming language for web development on the Microsoft platform, C++ is a lower-level language used for system development. Nobody does web development in C++.

Not surprisingly, a high percentage of Slauson’s candidates bit the dust in the initial phone screen with me, because the phone screen was their first encounter with someone whose programming knowledge was non-zero and could possibly tell a good programmer from a bad programmer.

According to Kathy Slauson, that was totally unacceptable. She thought that because she had an in with the HR department, we should be hiring every candidate she sent over, qualified or not, and paying her for the privilege, which is the way it worked before I arrived on the scene and screwed up the process.

She was always very polite to me in person, assuring me that she was doing her best to improve the quality of candidates, but behind the scenes, she was telling Lucy the HR Director that I shouldn’t be allowed to interview candidates anymore.

(That information was never supposed to reach me but it did.)

Think about that: we had a recruiter telling our HR Director that a manager shouldn’t be allowed to interview their candidates. (The fact that I no longer work there tells you which side of the issue Lucy came down on.)

Kathy also told Lucy that the candidates I was rejecting were perfectly good candidates because after I turned them down, they were being hired at other companies.

Imagine that!

Of course they were being hired at other companies. They were being hired by companies with lower hiring standards for programmers. The best thing that could happen with some of those candidates is for them to be hired by competing organizations.

Do you think Amazon or Google worry that candidates they turn down get hired somewhere else?

(No, I wasn’t trying to match hiring standards with Amazon or Google. I’m just saying that it wasn’t my goal to be the employer of last resort, or to be able to say, “If we don’t hire ‘em, nobody’s gonna hire ‘em!”)

Everyone I hired was an order of magnitude improvement over the people they replaced.

I like to work with talented people. I’m not trying to get rich and I don’t have a career path. I’m trying to learn and get better and contribute to my profession.

If you give me a job where I’m responsible for hiring people, I’m going to hire the best people available, and decline to be force-fed unqualified candidates by a friend of the HR Director.

To be continued . . .

I recently concluded a 3-month job search. As part of my networking, I met a number of unemployed people in other fields who were having trouble not only getting jobs, but even getting interviews.

I talked to a lot of people and averaged about an interview a day, including phone interviews, mostly for development manager jobs. For every development manager job, there are multiple development jobs, so if you’re a developer, your situation is even better than mine was.

I live in Southern California, but the demand is not just local. I had multiple contacts from companies outside the SoCal area that can’t find qualified candidates.

I’ve been working again for over two months, I no longer have an active résumé on job boards, and I still get emails and calls every day from recruiters all over the country.

Agile and Scrum are in demand

The situation with Agile and Scrum right now seems to be that a lot of people are putting it on their résumé but most of them are bluffing.

One hiring manager told me that he’d talked to three dozen candidates who claimed to know Scrum and only one (me) who actually knew it.

Another hiring manager asked me to describe the Scrum process, beginning with a product owner with an idea through the end of the first sprint. It’s a basic question, and when I finished, he thanked me for my answer. “You’d be surprised how many people I ask that question and the answer is a yard sale.”

Actually, you’d be surprised how little I’d be surprised by that.

One recruiter contacted me about a 3-month Scrum Master contract in Toledo, Ohio. A glance at my résumé will tell you that I’ve never worked outside Southern California, so on a list of people likely to take a 3-month contract in Toledo, Ohio, my name would be far, far from the top, but the difficulty of finding a qualified candidate to fill that job is such that the recruiter contacted me anyway.

If you really know Agile and/or Scrum right now, it’s a seller’s market.

We all know poor people are on the wrong side of an uncrossable technological chasm known as the "digital divide." Their lack of iPads and data plans and broadband is just one more way they’re doomed to stay poor right up until they become the shock troops of the zombie apocalypse, am I right?

— There Is No Digital Divide – Technology Review

I keep hearing that there aren’t enough women in technology, like this is a problem. The most obvious explanation is that women don’t want to work in technology. If they want to work in other fields, fine. If they want to raise their kids, even better.

I did some tutoring for a girl taking AP Computer Science. She’s a junior in high school and wants to be a veterinarian. Afterwards, she told her dad, “If I decide not to be a veterinarian, maybe I’ll be a programmer.”

Don’t let it be said that I’m not doing my part to address the shortage of women in technology, even though I think it’s baloney . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

States should ban all driver use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices, except in emergencies, the National Transportation Board said Tuesday.

The recommendation, unanimously agreed to by the five-member board, applies to both hands-free and hand-held phones and significantly exceeds any existing state laws restricting texting and cellphone use behind the wheel.

— latimes.com

DISLIKE!

Busy, productive people need to talk and text while driving in order to jumpstart this economy!

Yes, some of them will die, but it’s a net win because the benefits outweigh the costs.

We don’t believe in the coming obsolescence of all human workers. In fact, some human skills are more valuable than ever, even in an age of incredibly powerful and capable digital technologies. But other skills have become worthless, and people who hold the wrong ones now find that they have little to offer employers. They’re losing the race against the machine, a fact reflected in today’s employment statistics. . . .

There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

— Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against The Machine

A 2011 study by telecommunications giant Ericsson found that 35% of iPhone and Android users check their email or Facebook account before getting out of bed in the morning.

I did a phone interview today with a programming candidate. Of the first six questions I asked him — and I don’t start with the hard questions — he gave a halfway correct answer to one.

I tried to wrap things up with some easier questions so he could end on a positive note. I struggled to find a question he could answer. It was a sad interview.

I saw from his résumé that he’d recently ended a 10-year run in a corporate IT department. Corporate IT departments are usually not on the leading edge of anything, and I have to surmise that he didn’t put in the necessary time to keep up with things on his own.

I don’t know how good he was 10 years ago, but at this point, his skills are stale, and he’s going to have a tough time in the job market.

I’ve spent a lot of my own time over the years reading things and working things out on the computer, creating untold domestic conflict in the process. It’s a battle.

It’s easy to let your career slip away from you . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

We just got new copiers at the office. They have 900 features, which makes it hard for people to figure out how to access the one feature they really want, i.e., making a copy.

My office is close to one of the copy rooms, so when I hear someone in there struggling with the new copier, I go in and tell them it’s voice-activated.

“Just say your name and the number of copies you want.”

“Jodi Smith. Two copies.”

Nothing happens.

“I don’t think you’re authorized to make copies. Get Debbie down here and have her try it.”

Update: We had training classes today on how to use the copiers. I’m dating myself here but I can actually remember when it was possible to operate a copier without a training class.

Uh oh, it looks like the wireless connection here at EppsNet headquarters just went down . . .

“NOTHING MAKES ME ANGRIER THAN AN UNRELIABLE NETWORK CONNECTION!” my son yells. “WE NEED A NEW ROUTER! WE NEED A NEW MODEM! WE NEED A NEW SERVICE PROVIDER! WE NEED NEW COMPUTERS!”

“We don’t need new computers,” his mom says.

“YES WE DO!”

• RT @yoyoha: When technology finally makes me obsolete, I'm going to take a nice long nap. #
• RT @yoyoha: "I know you're not crazy" is a good thing to say to a crazy person. #

“This TV cuts off the bottom of the scrolling bar,” my son says as we’re watching a football game. “I can’t tell if it says SCORE ALERT or SCORF ALERT. I assume it says SCORE ALERT but I don’t really know.”

“That’s a really good point,” I say.

“And I don’t care about scorfs. I only care about scores.”

• If you can substitute toothpaste for spackle, can you substitute spackle for toothpaste? Might be good for whitening your teeth… #
• RT @paulandstorm: [S] Today's trillion-dollar idea: patent the concept of "technology" #

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Jobless workers in Silicon Valley are giving up on the region’s dominant technology industry and trying to switch to other fields, as the area’s unemployment rate spikes above the national and state average.

Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate — which was below California’s average and largely tracked the national average last year — has soared, surpassing the state average in May. By June, the area’s unadjusted unemployment rate was 11.8%, worse than California’s 11.6% and the national rate of 9.7%, according to the latest figures from California’s Employment Development Department.

Many of the jobless techies are targeting new gigs in the clean-energy or health-care industries . . . Some are shifting even further afield, looking for jobs in teaching or financial consulting. People are leaving tech as “more tech companies are offshoring and some are shrinking, plus people are burned out and tired from having been there and done that.”

— Silicon Valley’s Jobless Unplug From Tech – WSJ.com

• RT @diablocody: Re: people using the word “robust” when describing technology. It’s a phone, not Bolognese sauce. #
• Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it’s the only one you have. — Emile-Auguste Chartier #
• Oxymoron of the day: optional requirements #