[huebnerob]

It happens all over the place all the time, if you don't stay late you're "not a team player". Of course your employer isn't going to say you're fired because you're a parent, unless their attorneys are bored. That doesn't make it any more moral to discriminate based on proxy metrics, like how much of your life you're willing to donate to an entity that cares about you only to the extent you're making them profit.

[lhorie]

I mean, nobody goes to an interview and asks "hey how late do you work in your current job?", so I don't understand how it is possible to discriminate by proxy metrics at that point in the process.

Maybe you're arguing that people leave their jobs after the fact due to thinly disguised rationalizations of these proxy metrics affecting raises, but that's a huge stretch. I've seen plenty of cases of bosses and coworkers being understanding of personal circumstances (and I'd go as far as saying that is more so here in SF than at previous jobs in Canada) and I've yet to see these alleged backstabbing evil brogrammers. Saying that a company likes this or that is also anthropomorphizing something that isn't sentient and strikes me as a strawman.

[kkarakk]

they don't need to - your github/ side projects tell them all they need to know & you're probably required to submit them to even be considered. you think someone with a full time family is going to have the same output in code as a single person with nothing but their career going on?

discriminating is trivial if they just have your name

[lhorie]

No offense but there's a lot wrong with this comment...

While having a github presence can help recruiters find you, you aren't required to have such presence at all; the vast majority of people I interview don't (and the same goes for coworkers).

Measuring lines of code written is another fallacy that gets thrown around easily, but that any engineer worth their salt knows is a stupid metric (1MLOC of shit code is a pile of shit). One only needs to look at their most recent perf evaluation to realize that absolute code output doesn't actually factor in - it's high level impact perception that does, if anything.

Being single doesn't in any way correlate to more dedication; plenty of singles clock 9-5 and spend free time on non-coding activities (games, TV, exercise, etc), and plenty of family people work late by choice. It's not even an either-or proposition either: there are married people w/ no kids, single people that need to pick up their dogs at daycare, people that work so late so often that they become unproductive due to fatigue, etc.

The idea that someone will take your name and go dig up all your personal info and discriminate you and cackle maniacally is just flat out absurd. As someone who's been both an outsider and an insider to bay area tech, I honestly don't see evidence of discrimination, deliberate or otherwise. I feel like the occam's razor in this discussion is that armchair speculators seal themselves in an echo chamber of delusional conspiracy theory out of self pity or to feel smug. I also noticed that there are people who have had asshat bosses/coworkers at companies w/ dysfunctional cultures and think that experience translates to there being asshats everywhere.

[vehementi]

Yeah there is a huge amount of armchair conspiracy invention in this thread.