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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Yes there is a problem this is obvious. However... as long as women make up such a tiny minority of CS graduates there is no short-term financial incentive for companies to not just market directly to men.

For example, if a certain recruiting tactic would double the number of qualified male applicants, but halve the number of qualified female applicants, it is clearly a short-term gain for a company.

That's why the statement quoted in the grandparent post is wrong.

Obviously it's bad for the industry to have a culture that is so exclusionary of 50% of the population, but that's more of a long-term goal. There is very little any company can do to e.g. increase the number of women graduating from CS programs in the next 3 years, since that number is more-or-less fixed now.

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That's a good point. I suspect that a higher proportion of women in CS would solve a lot of the issues we're seeing right now in regards to sexism.

But at the same time, it's really difficult to attract more women into CS when the atmosphere isn't welcoming of women in the first place. It's a bit of a cycle really.

Many commenters on this site, pg included, have noted that the economics of hiring are rationally biased to false negatives. This makes sense, because the price of false positives is so high. Unfortunately, this tends to accentuate societal factors, such as prejudice.

I would argue that with developers, the cost of a false negative is higher. It is just that most companies don't understand the loss walking out the door. Interviews are fraught with 1001 ways to get a negative from a top 10 developer. The cost of hiring a bad one and figuring out they are bad is about 2 weeks pay, the cost of passing over a quality developer is the loss of a rare find and probably that developers social circle. Do not underestimate the cost of false negatives in relation to developers.

2 weeks pay? How is it supposed to work? I believe you are basically stuck with a bad hire for at least one performance review period, plus some time on top of that. Anything less and you have a potential wrongful termination lawsuit on your hands.

Quite a few organizations hire on a contract basis for a period of time to ensure that it is going to work out for both parties. It's fairly standard practice to avoid committing to the unknown on both sides.

This seems like it is probably the case. Due to the incentives that drive hiring decisions, individuals and companies may all be making (short-term) rational decisions, with the net result that women are excluded.

The consequences of hiring someone that doesn't fit into a particular company's culture are quite severe -- not to mention potentially expensive. There can be a lot of reluctance, some of it understandable, to hiring anyone who is different in any significant way from current employees. That most obviously includes women, but (at companies where most employees are young and single) also older workers, people with children, etc.

The lack of women is the most glaring, but I suspect if you ran the numbers that there are a lot of other groups underrepresented in software development. It's not so much that women are being specifically excluded, as it is that a certain type of person (male geek, to be blunt) is being specifically sought.

This is true.

My guess is that the "bro culture" is designed to attract a different population of men, who ordinarily would have gone to Wall Street or similar industries, but are attracted to the present web boom.

When the bubble's over, I predict the brogramming fad will fade. I certainly wouldn't want to work at a place with that culture if I could avoid it, but it seems like an essentially temporary phenomenon.

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