Having no CS degree myself and excelling in a top 10 company I agree with this sentiment, especially seeing the epidemic of “over leveling” the small pool of CS graduates occurring. I’d rather work with correctly leveled non-CS graduates than over-leveled CS graduates
Internal training, ok, but are you going to only provide internal training to women? Is this even legal?
Basecamp training, ok, but are you going to only provide basecamp training to women? Is this even legal?
Special talents (dropouts etc.), ok, but are you going to only hire special talents who are women? Is this even legal?
Non-traditional education, ok, but are you going to only hire non-traditional education candidates who are women? Is this even legal?
The whole idea that there is a social engineering way to make programmers 50% male/female is not based on any facts as we know in a free society. On the contrary, there is evidence that the more gender equal society, the fewer women choose STEM. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
The obsession of 50% is not only anti-science, it is also demeaning to other great contributions women provide to society. Yes, nurses and teachers make less money than programmers, but it does not mean nurses and teachers are less important than programmers. It is because personal caring kind of job is less scalable than STEM jobs, so a team of 10 programmers can provide services to far more people than 10 nurses.
Oh, are you going to disagree that caring for people is more a part of female nature than male nature? Are you going to say this is actually a result of society oppressed women and tricked them to care more about others? Because female psychology is exactly the same as male psychology? So maybe we should expect a gender equal society there are 50% male/female in murders and rapists?
Good luck with that. People who profit exploiting "gender gap" like bootcamps, hr firms, speaker agencies, will never be happy.
Unless it is about starting a business and making money via ads.... Then they're willing to devote thousand of hours of their life thinking creatively about how to solve problems to "change the world".
They do support initiatives to help but realize it is essentially generational at this point.
In contrast nobody has changed the gender ratio in tech without discriminating against men: a zero sum game that definitely does not increase wealth for everyone.
As for your dismissal of people's 83 reasons, why not show us how it's done and address them?
It certainly doesn't increase the wealth of people who are persuaded to buy stuff that really isn't worthwhile for them.
Just because I cannot extract monetary value by buying another MIDI controller for my hobby doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile purchase. If you derived enjoyment from a purchase, it increased your [non-material] wealth and added value.
The same way, Gmail and FB make money by selling ads, but if they didn't exist without ads, it is easily arguable that people would have missed out on a lot of wealth and benefits that comes with those things. I use Gmail, because I extract value from using it. And I pay for it by letting Google personalize my ads and sell them. For me, that exchange is absolutely worth it. If it wasn't, I wouldn't have been using it.
I would LOVE to create a large curriculum in house that aims to teach non degree holding individuals these skill sets because it would have tremendous return on investment. Be we are a small company (<100) with limited resources that can not afford to have a six month on boarding process to Do it properly (and I am not a professor).
It is an unrealistic burden to any small or medium org to do what is required by your comment.
Depends on what you classify as serious work, I guess?
From years of reading similar comments and my own experience, I was under the impression most “software developer” jobs only lightly touch on anything complex - most of us aren’t designing databases and complex low-level stuff day-to-day, but we do need to know enough to not do something terribly inefficient and stupid in basic plumbing code.
I think what you really need are smart people, and people who are willing to put in the work to get past the first few years of stumbling and not knowing what anything means. Likewise, young developers need good mentors and patient senior developers to lean on and who they can pick this stuff up from.
Not sure what your company is doing, but if what you say is true, maybe you are one of the rarer groups actually doing the hard stuff.
I totally agree with you, but that doesn't solve the issue, there are not that many of those people out there struggling to get jobs, because employers already know about this trick. That's why a bunch of quant and other top-tier finance shops are full of math and physics grads who had almost zero knowledge of finance before getting hired for those jobs.
Having a CS degree perhaps helps a little for general background, but not every CS major has taken a db class and even then, they won't have learned many useful practical skills, like analyzing and fixing a slow production query. And conversely the folks who have been through bootcamps (that we have hired!) are all very self-directed and highly motivated to learn. So I'm not sure that the difference is quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.
I do completely agree with you that this is important, and that it's very hard to get companies to devote resources to it. Taking 6-8 hours a week out of a senior engineer's time to prepare and teach an effective class is a big ask; I had a lot of support from management to do this but I think that might be a rare luxury at other companies.
It's just sad that the tech industry doesn't invest more in high-quality structured teaching, when it could so clearly deliver benefits in terms of growing skills for engineers from both CS and non CS backgrounds. Assuming that they'll somehow learn everything they need without structure or direction might work in a few cases, but in general it's a poor long term strategy for both companies and the industry as a whole.
The value of a degree is less the information it teaches, and more as a filter for people who are unusually smart and/or self-motivated. Those people coming with the requisite CS theory is merely a bonus.
I took the intended sentiment to be that of finding talent among non-degree holders that won't necessarily present itself in a typical CS interview scenario. Thus we need a way to identify future CS talent that is merely in need of training and mentoring. And so the problem reduces to, in my opinion, to finding people who are smart and unusually self-motivated. But there is just no good way of doing this.
What do I mean by personal questions? My favorite interview so far left all the academic quizzing aside and asked me to talk in-depth about a particular real-world project I worked on. What patterns did I use? How did it interact with the database? How did I model the problem? This was not something that would be easily googled and it let me convey how I think about software on my own terms. Then it was up to the interviewer if my approach to software would be useful to them.
You don’t need much to be productive. There’s plenty of great guardrails like code reviews, pair programming and shadowing that can make someone surprisingly productive.
The value of a degree is social signaling that you are the “type” of person to be able get that degree, socioeconomically and temperamentally. Plenty of people out there for whom the economics of a degree didn’t make any sense, or they had bigger needs that had to be filled immediately so didn’t have the ability to sacrifice for the long term.
Counterpoint: the overwhelming majority of software companies out there do not work on problems and develop products that warrant deep computer science expertise.
I mean, if you're doing cutting edge and/or highly technical stuff, great, go nuts, recruit only those with CS degrees. But most software out there is your run-of-the-mill line of business software, mostly CRUD with a bit of specialized functionality. And the bar for working on that is way lower.
I used to be very degree-centric in my recruiting. But some time ago I started hiring from boothcamps, particularly for frontend jobs. The fact I saw is that as part of the development needs of the companies I have been at, there is a good amount of work that can be done by developers of these skill levels. Once my team was able to organize the work, we were able to make jr people productive.
This not only made us capable of hiring jr devs. It actually made more Sr devs happy because they did not have to do that work and made mid levels happy because they own the growth of the jr devs .
It might depend on how the degree is taught I guess, mine had very little actual programming.
Where did you get your info from? Because I just checked the Stanford CS curriculum requirements for Bachelors degree, and it clearly has "Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy" requirement, along with a senior project requirement (that would, I assume, includes writing), as well as 3-5 credit units from the list of approved "Technology in Society" courses.[0]
0. https://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofengineering/comp...
My engineering program required an upper-division course from the philosophy department on the development of rigorously ethical systems of thought.
Sometimes you go ahead and walk the fine line of the no true scotsman argument - a degree without this basic math isn't CS. And any "reputable" CS degree - and by "reputable" I don't mean top 10 or even top 50, I just mean a fine university with a proper curriculum - will absolutely have this requirement.
Additionally, if you meant specifically without CS degrees, I think a lot of companies accept unrelated degrees + experience.
> I am one of them
You, yourself, are a large pool? Or you, yourself are one instance of a fairly small pool (like OP suggests).