It's less about individual goals than about the mismatch between talent and opportunity.
There are people out there who could make meaningful contribution to this profession. There is a demand for people who could make a meaningful contribution to this profession. There are artificial barriers, based on gender/race/class/whatever that make it marginally harder for some people to contribute.
A more concrete example: The unemployment rate in my country is very huge, and yet my organization is still having a hard time finding talent. Is it because none of the millions of people looking for work could possibly do what I need done? It seems more likely that the complex system of forces has dissuaded talented people from getting skills in this profession.
> There are artificial barriers, based on gender/race/class/whatever that make it marginally harder for some people to contribute.
Can you provide an example of the barriers of which you speak? I find that a lot of the time I'm told about how people with qualities distinct from mine should be cut some slack or given extra incentives to get into industry to correct some sort of imbalance, and that the imbalance is somehow evidence of barriers that we can't see, and that incentivising these groups (and in effect putting barriers up against people like me) is the way forward.
To me, discrimination is discrimination, regardless. I don't take issue with any qualities of anyone - the right person for the job is the right person for the job. Perhaps historically barriers meant that the right person for the job was a white male (bearing in mind societal pressures, the availability of education and options etc.) and the prevalence of white males is a hangover, if so like all hangovers it will die down.
What I do know is that in my profession (technical infosec) there's a hard time finding talent, but that's because your average graduate student won't cut it. So we're stuck in a pool where you have a subset of CS grads, with some security interest and experience, subset of which have a particular mindset and abilities, and in turn a subset of which won't run away at the prospect of learning a staggering amount of information about systems, programs and all kinds of stuff are what you're after. Then on top of that I get told that because there's a skew further up the chain that I should incentivise particular groups to 'correct an imbalance' I have no direct control over.
Can you provide an example of the barriers of which you speak?
Here's a real-world example: A workplace where most of the (all-male) development team is using the same "bikini babe" screensaver. It's a small thing to a guy, something you may not even notice. It's a small thing to plenty of women, too. Some other women may see that as an implicit message that they aren't taken seriously as anything but a sex object.
Sure, it's a small thing, but small things add up.
I don't want to say that you are the problem or that you should hire unqualified people to correct an imbalance. All I want is for people to be honest with themselves that this world isn't a pure meritocracy and that you may be (as I am) the beneficiary of privilege based on sex or race or class. Is that really controversial?
Women getting their panties in a bunch about something as minor as that is the reason they aren't taken seriously in the workplace (to the extent they aren't, I mean).
Writing correct software is so close to impossible that we would actually be be better off without a large majority of the people who are already charging big money for utter crap. I don't see how we can expect more meaningful contributions from anyone who isn't irrestibly drawn to this Sisyphean work.