[kevintb]

Key point:

> there really aren’t enough women to meet demand… if we keep hiring the way we’re hiring. Namely, if we keep over-indexing on CS degrees from top schools, and even if we remove unconscious bias from the process entirely, we will not get to gender parity. And yes, there is a way to surface strong candidates without relying on proxies like college degree.

I am all in favour of reducing the industry’s reliance on fancy name schools for hiring.

[brightball]

Several of the best developers I know have no degree at all. I know one guy who did a boot camp 2-3 years ago and since then has self taught himself so much that he's one of the most knowledgeable people I've been around.

He was recently told in an interview that he otherwise passed with flying colors that, "someone with a boot camp education couldn't be seriously considered."

It's mind blowing to me that anyone in charge of hiring for technical positions can be dense enough to think that your education stops when your career starts.

[commandlinefan]

> "someone with a boot camp education couldn't be seriously considered."

Ok, wait a minute - they brought him in for a full interview, knowing that he didn’t have a degree, made him jump through all the hoops and then told him that he was never actually under consideration at all? That’s douche behavior no matter how you feel about college degrees.

[brightball]

Yes. It was as if they brought him in to fill an interview requirement and didn't actually think he would qualify.

[commandlinefan]

Well, that’s inexcusable behavior BUT - we can safely assume they ended up hiring somebody else, who had a degree. In other words, somebody who was as qualified as he was, but who also had a degree. In other other words, somebody more (maybe only slightly more, but still more) qualified. Requiring some sort of a degree is still reasonable, up until the point where a position actually goes unfilled due to it.

[mrkstu]

Why is that a safe assumption?

You're assuming that he wasn't, in fact, the best candidate that interviewed based on what?

Since they didn't seriously consider him they may have left behind the best candidate available to them. The original poster said "he's one of the most knowledgeable people I've been around."

Assuming that poster has a wide exposure to developers, its highly possible that the position didn't get a better applicant.

[x0x0]

You're going to find any stupid choices in a wide enough pool. That's not representative: I know boot camp grads at FAANGs.

At smaller companies -- like mine -- it's not that we won't hire out of boot camps. We do, and have. But we're very conscious of search and training costs. Search costs can be somewhat fixed with money by using internal recruiters; training costs are horrific. Bootcamp grads are nearly useless in a professional environment without enormous amounts of senior / staff eng time.

[zebraflask]

If the boot camp is used as a get up to speed mechanism by someone with a previous technical background of some kind, even tangential, I guess it could work out sometimes.

I tried to look for a junior dev recently and was flooded with boot camp resumes from career changers. The code samples were all more or less cut and paste type stuff where you could tell immediately that even if the candidate were a fairly bright and motivated person, the degree of handholding needed to ramp them up would be just impossible.

[bsder]

> Bootcamp grads are nearly useless in a professional environment without enormous amounts of senior / staff eng time.

To be fair, this is also true for standard undergrads.

The difference between a cooperative engineering student and a standard undergrad is quite staggering--9-12 months of working experience causes a vast differential.

[x0x0]

Our experience is similar. The skills gained in the first year -- how to actually use git, basic db skills, bash skills, bundler/nvm/etc, better debugging, better problem solving, working outside of greenfield projects, etc make a huge difference.

[wolfspider]

I’ve had to change my thinking about this to adapt to modern times. I used to think like this about internal recruiting however there is a bias — to avoid anything they do not know. There are recent grads and outsider devs that are really good actually. Top engineers are not immune to saying somebody is bad and lying about it because what they believe is good only means “never question tribal judgement”. They aren’t immune to creating networks across various companies to take hiring managers for the proverbial ride either. Dig deeper because what you may believe is hand-holding is an unwillingness by the team to disclose basic info to get the job done. It happens way more than we want to admit but people are still just people despite the fancy job titles.

[nick_]

I definitely believe you and I think plenty of good devs have just a boot camp education, but I've also had a conversation with someone who came out of a dev boot camp and was very upset that they weren't treated like any other dev in the job market. Meanwhile, it was quite obvious they had no foundational experience/knowledge in terms of technical problem solving skills.

[brightball]

No argument there. It's not a wholesale endorsement of boot camps or anything...more that you need to judge the person and not the piece of paper.

[Jyaif]

In my experience in France, all of the genius-level developers I know come from a prestigious school.

Not surprising as the prestigious schools pretty much exclusively take in the top ~2000 students of the country every year.

[xyzzyz]

> I am all in favour of reducing the industry’s reliance on fancy name schools for hiring.

Soon after the industry seriously stops doing this, the fancy name schools will quickly get female-dominated, and whatever the industry starts using as a signal of candidate quality that hadn't been male-dominated before, will start to be.

When proposing new policies, always solve for equilibrium, don't ignore second order effects, and never assume the world is steady state system.

[majos]

> Soon after the industry seriously stops doing this, the fancy name schools will quickly get female-dominated

Why would this happen? Is your thinking that men will respond to the lower incentive of a fancy school degree by pursuing other options, but women won't? If so, why?

[xyzzyz]

Pretty much, yes. You are asking why would the response to this incentive affect people of different gender differently. I don’t have any clear answer to this question, other than pointing out that in the current system, we already have an existing imbalance, so there is already a difference in how incentives affect different people, and unless we determine the exact mechanism here, random changes are unlikely to change it.

By the way, this is called Campbell’s law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

[Pharaoh2]

Presumably because the gap exists in the current system, and the current system is optimized for the current scoring function. Changing the scoring function will cause the system to rebalance into a new steady state.

Although, there is no clear reason why the new steady state would not be female dominant or evenly split, but if I were to take a bet, I would bet that the new scoring function will still hold existing bias because the problem starts much earlier.

[wolco]

I would think the opposite. More males are in trade schools programming than females. Females make up a higher percentage number of college students compared to males.

[nostrademons]

I think that was his point - "the fancy name schools will get female-dominated".

[DoofusOfDeath]

> When proposing new policies, always solve for equilibrium, don't ignore second order effects, and never assume the world is steady state system.

I've thought along similar lines, but it was never clear to me if such a policy really performs "better" in real-world, politicized policy issues.

Do you know of any supporting examples?

[bsder]

> I am all in favour of reducing the industry’s reliance on fancy name schools for hiring.

1) The fact that people aren't hiring from schools lower on the list tells me that we have an oversupply of CS majors. If I need an employee, I'll do what I have to to get one--this indicates that most companies don't really need CS people.

2) "60% of software engineers at FAAMNG hold a degree from a top 20 school" isn't automatically damning. Some of those schools simply produce a LOT of students. I seem to remember something like University of Illinois produces almost 20% of all engineers graduated annually. Silicon Valley also may simply have a local bias because Berkeley and Stanford are literally next door.

3) If I had a chance to direct a talented female in terms of college study, I would point her at engineering, not CS. Engineering has its own bias problems, but seems to be a lot less toxic than CS. It also seems to have better geographic spread of jobs than CS right now.

[baddox]

That does seem to be the key point, but it directly contradicts the catchy headline "there really is a pipeline problem." This reads like the author is complaining that there's no way to improve hiring diversity without....significantly changing the hiring process. Well, yeah?