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by ch4s3 3695 days ago
I think a better way to put this would be, don't penalize women for not participating in open source. There are a number of societal/cultural factors that preclude or push women out of open source, so have some understanding of that when interviewing women.
1 comments
yarper 3695 days ago
It doesn't have to be open source, private repos, private gitlab etc all fine.
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ch4s3 3695 days ago
One of the societal/cultural factors I'm talking about is the caregiver's burden. Children, the elderly, and the infirmed are typically(at least in the US) cared for by women. This is a significant time suck. I'm just saying you shouldn't penalize a woman for not doing side projects, she may have more important shit to do in her nonworking hours.

And for that matter, you shouldn't penalize anyone for not writing a ton of code in their free time, there are other things in life, and more demands on your time the older you get. And anecdotally, some of the better developers I know write 0 lines of code in their off hours, they are consummate professionals but leave it at work.

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yarper 3695 days ago
So there's no correlation in skill between the people that put hours of their own time into honing their craft, and those that don't?
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ch4s3 3695 days ago
Maybe, maybe not. I suppose that depends on what and how they choose to practice. And there's nothing wrong with giving positive weight to personal projects. I'm just saying you shouldn't penalize people for spending their personal time on things other than coding.
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omonra 3695 days ago
If two people are equally smart, the one who spends more time practicing will be better. Is it not in the primary interest of the company to hire the more qualified candidate?

Do basketball teams sit around worrying that they ought to not penalize players who don't practice free throws on their personal time?

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ch4s3 3695 days ago
You're perhaps misreading me. I stated that the lack of side projects shouldn't be held against people. I think it's fine give positive weight to good, relevant side projects.

I would also argue that a person who is more deliberate about their use of fewer hours will do better than someone who is equally smart but practices less deliberately for more hours[1].

I think that imagining two fully equal candidates only differentiated by their volume of personal projects isn't a particularly useful exercise.

[1]http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

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