[nilkn]

It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence?

Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningful. It sounds like the attitude of her manager towards the incompetent developer is actually the most significant point here: this incompetent developer is being retained and in fact praised by her manager for diversity despite the obvious issues. Does the manager treat incompetent male developers the same way? The implication of the post is clearly "no", but again selection bias is possible.

[dvanduzer]

Yes.

In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them.

Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those employers hired were men.

[nilkn]

I meant for my question to be directed specifically towards the person making the claim about her specific coworkers at a specific company. This company has hiring practices that are not necessarily reflected across all of corporate America, and the claims being made are about those specific hiring practices and the effects that they have.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

From what little the OP has said about her company I am willing to take a wild guess that she does indeed work for a large coproration (lip service paid to diversity, incompetent people hired to demonstrate it)- where you can expect this sort of thing to be very common.

I don't know about corporate America in particular, but corporate anything is a big pile of useless dipped in incompetent, where all the work is done by contractors who are also useless and incompetent. Because there is noone in the damn org that knows how to hire a competent techie in the first place.

So for me the OP's experience is more simply explained by working for an organisation that doesn't know how to hire engineers, not anything to do with diversity drives.

[dotnetisnotdead]

In a way that was my point, I just wasn't really good at relaying it. Of course there are many incompetent male engineers but it's more noticeable when they are a "diversity hire".

I don't present my situation as anything more than anecdotal, it's just what I've noticed. And to answer your question no the manager does not treat male developers the same way, they're held to a higher standard. In fact the "middle-aged white male" has to be above average at this particular company to be kept on.

[goialoq]

https://xkcd.com/385/

[stephenr]

> she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries

I'd wager a third of the nodejs "developer community" could be described that way. The key thing is was she hired to write sql queries?

[dotnetisnotdead]

Yes, that is part of her job, but it wasn't covered in the interview process from what I've been told.

[stephenr]

I've worked with plenty of tech and related people who didn't understand basic technologies we expect in a given field.

I tend to reserve judgement until their effort can be judged. If he or she is slow but learning and improving, I'd accept (and probably raise with a manager) that the hiring process is flawed and try to help him/her.

If its just utter idiocy, I'm less forgiving.

I literally had a business analyst come to me - the new guy at the time - on her last day after several years of working in the org and ask me what her email address is.

Or the BA who insisted she didnt need to write a clear and specific spec for a feature, because she could just open up dreamweaver and put some buttons on a page.

Those sorts of people I have zero fucking time for, and will drink merrily when they quit/are fired.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Unfortunately, they tend to be promoted quickly. For being so brilliant, you understand.

And then they're your boss. Or your boss's mate.

[Gusbenz]

Does she even bother looking at the docs or would that also denote how useless she is?

[dotnetisnotdead]

Well, she is learning it now and I wouldn't call her "useless". But her level of experience and knowledge is far below "software engineer" and if she were a guy she couldn't get away with it.

[querulous]

you'd be surprised. i worked with people who would write simple json structures by creating a class in java and then serializing it and printing it to the console to copy and paste. most of them were promoted out to management

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Actually, there is a certain wisdom to promoting incompetent people in this manner. At least then you know that they're nowhere near anything they can use to do real lasting damage.

[smsm42]

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

[swingedseraph]

> and if she were a guy she couldn't get away with it

I think this is untrue. I know a lot of male "sofware engineers" who are totally incompetent and remain well employed.

[weberc2]

Presumably the OP meant "remain in that role in the company"; not necessarily intending to extrapolate to all positions at all companies.

[goialoq]

The best C++ programmer (someone who does real magic in the machine) I know has said that they can't think in SQL. Different people have different skills and mindsets.

[mcknz]

Strikes me as a distinction without a difference -- incompetence means you are incapable of performing a task.

One could speak of someone having more skill than another, but if both skillsets have no value, it doesn't really matter.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence?

Oh yes. Especially if you work in, say, a big financial corporation- the kind of large, monolithic organisation that isn't a technology company, per se, but uses technology (as only a large monolith would). In that kind of place, you can expect the majority of "technical" employees to be largely uninterested in, and therefore fairly clueless about, technology (i.e. they're just in it to jump over to tech management roles down the line). So, software engineers who can't write SQL queries are a thing. A common, inescepable fact of life, indeed.

I would not like to say whether I'm speaking of personal experience with such organisations. It wouldn't be proper.