I got my first tech-related internship back in the summer of 2009. The position was a very competitive one with a company in the heart of San Francisco. While I was ecstatic, I was also confused.
I hadn’t done very well on the interview. I screwed up the first question about dropping two eggs from a 100-story building (couldn’t get away from thinking binary search), and messed up a different question about the number of bits required to store some large number (mixed up “bits” and “bytes” and tried to calculated log_2 in my head, only to get it wrong).
Nor did I have much experience. I had barely heard of a version control system, had never really gotten accustomed to the command prompt, and hadn’t even written a single line of production code (well... beyond my silly tournament signup page, which refused to let you sign up if you had an underscore in your email).
Needless to say I probably left very bad first impressions on my coworkers. I was the silly little girl asking questions like, “What was that command you use to get into that other machine?”
So, here’s the hypothesis: companies want to hire more female programmers, either because they are constantly accused of being sexist or because they actually value having a gender-balanced team. So they lower the hiring bar for women, and end up letting in people who may not be as experienced. The rest of the team only sees that a woman was hired and she has very little experience as a programmer, and concludes that women are bad programmers.
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OR......they saw potential in you regardless of how bad you screwed up the questions since you showed a system of reasoning by which you came to your answers. Also, the whole "rest of the team...." thing follows a pretty weak line of reasoning.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good observation/theory...although lately I've noticed that companies don't really do this. If I make the smallest mistake in an interview I'll usually get rejected. It's only when I 100% ace every question that I think this works...competition is going up and even though companies used to be able to afford less experienced people, these days I'm seeing it happen less frequently.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's changing now, but I've seen my first/second year female friends land very competitive co-op positions. It's something that I hear a lot about from anther university offering co-op programs as well. Granted, the plural of anecdote is not data, and this is something that is very difficult to capture as data.
ReplyDeleteI've also heard companies telling potential hires, "You know, you should work for us. We have some good female interns lined up next term as well." I wonder if that was the real reason why the female interns were hired. (And that opens a totally new can of worms.)
That's a wacko theory, with lack of understanding how business works. Businesses exist for profit. Maximize product (quality & quantity), and minimize cost/effort. They hired because you were fit for the job.
ReplyDeleteI think that one can add value to a tech firm by being something other than a great programmer. There are numerous studies about the benefit of diversity in the workspace, and while these benefits are hard to measure, it is not inconceivable for businesses to want to be more gender-balanced. (In fact good tech companies have frequent conversations about how to make themselves more friendly to women: I've seen this issue come up at Facebook while I was there.)
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's a stretch to say that I was hired partly because I am female. Perhaps they thought I would be able to better motivate the other programmers? Maybe they genuinely saw something in me? There's a lot of uncertainties because at the end of the day, it's people making hiring decisions and people are not going to be able to make the most optimal decision for the company. People have to rely on heuristics.