Code You Do It?
EssaysOpinions / Tech Sunday16 Comments
The other day, NPR had a segment about employment, tech, and coding. According to this piece, there will be upwards of a million coding job openings, set to go unfilled for a lack of employees with the requite skills. The bleeding heart cynic in me had a lot of reactions to this. I decided to share my opinion on the subject.
1. Back in the early 2000s companies shed tech jobs like crazy. Skilled, competent labor left the market. Then when it turned out they’d cut too deep and they needed to rehire, well, those workers were gone.
2. If tech would take the lead and solve their gender and diversity imbalance, maybe there wouldn’t be a million unfilled jobs looming. Let’s spend a minute on that. Maybe fixing that problem requires changing the way companies think about hiring and way they treat the people they hire. Married, white, male employees can work crazy hours because there’s a woman at home doing all the heavy lifting. The current employment environment relies on women shouldering the majority of the work of family and home. It’s pretty effing ironic that these companies (looking at you IBM, because you go caught) then bitch (heh!) that women just leave to have children or burn out or want time off. The folks at the top have the privilege of unpaid female labor to get and keep them there.
3. Here’s another interesting thought exercise:
Cliche: Adults don’t know anything about tech. They need their kids to show them how it’s done.
Reality: The internet was invented by people who are now in their 60s.
4. I work for a company where upper management is just about all people of color. The CEO of this company has no problem finding and hiring skilled AND diverse IT management and staff. Maybe, just maybe, the diversity problem isn’t a problem of a lack of diverse talent. Maybe the problem is companies with a hiring problem and a retention problem. If Ferguson has taught us anything it’s that racism is alive and well and so ingrained in our daily lives White people can’t even see it. Maybe our 3-strikes and Zero-tolerance programs need to applied to racist and misogynist behavior instead of drugs and crime.
5. Tech has transformed our lives. Just think what we might achieve if companies had the input and talents of ALL the qualified, brilliant people they currently keep outside. Maybe building a working environment that does not require anyone to sacrifice family and personal lives for success at the office would gain far more than is lost when they stop relying on white male employees working 80 and more hours a week.
6. Talk about teaching coding all you want. But don’t forget that talent comes in all size, genders, and colors. I’ll give you a pass on your complaints about a dearth of talent just as soon as you stop limiting where you look for talent.
Yes to all of that- and we’ve known this since the 90s if not before.
There’s also rampant age discrimination in tech. So yeah, I agree. The problem they face is of their own damned narrow-minded making.
@Mike Cane:
Oh, yes, indeed. Despite the brilliance of the old fogies who came before them, there’s this ridiculous notion that age and experience mean nothing.
@Deborah Nam-Krane:
Exactly. And yet it’s shocking, shocking! to them that there might be a problem.
The thing that’s depressing to me is that at the upper middle class and management levels, one income that comes with crazy hours is often more than two incomes from jobs with more reasonable expectations.
There does seem to be local coder shortage (which is understandable as many of these roles were previously outsourced overseas). The dear hubby recently attended a tech incubation weekend. The idea was to bring together a group of people interested in participating in a tech start up. Idea folks would be partnered with coders, marketers, finance folks, etc. The reality was… there were 10 idea people for every coder and as every business development gal knows, you need the opposite ratio to bring a project to fruition.
As for discrimination, I don’t know many white coders. Maybe it is because I live in Canada (though my dear wonderful hubby works for a large tech company so we tend to go to many US tech events) but when I picture top notch coding talent, the face I see in my mind isn’t white.
I totally agree about there not being very many female coders and those coders are usually snagged by female targeted or female run start ups and growing businesses. Why fight the establishment when you can work with people who want your unique perspective and respect you?
The laws of supply and demand should eventually even everything out. Coder salaries should rise, attracting more people to the craft.
@SAO: “The thing that’s depressing to me is that at the upper middle class and management levels, one income that comes with crazy hours is often more than two incomes from jobs with more reasonable expectations.”
Two people working toward one goal are almost always more successful than two people working toward two goals.
The hubby and I discovered this when I exited my new business development career to focus on writing. I have more time to act as his adviser. We pool our business experience and, as a result, he adds more value to his employer and makes fewer (costly) mistakes.
As you mentioned, discrimination by age is a factor. According to an article I read there is a bias toward hiring younger employees because they are willing to work longer hours and older employees have learned about life balance. I know I sure did – you never get those hours back. Since permanent jobs are usually exempt, employers don’t have to pay overtime. Since most corporations use achieving budgetary goals as the important metric, this gives them no incentive to hire a second person. I don’t think that’s in their best interest, since overworked people make mistakes and have less time to come up with ideas and solutions. The corporations I worked for (I’m a CPA) spent vast amounts of money trying programs (in a different part of the budget) to increase morale and productivity of the overworked employees, when the solution should have been to use that money to hire more people. It has been consistently shown in study after study, work conditions are more important to employee retention than benefits and lame team building exercises.
@Cynthia Sax:
In Silicon Valley, mid to senior software engineer salaries are in the $120,000 range. The same is true for experienced database people. This is not a salary issue except that women get offered significantly less money when they have the same experience and skill.
Low salaries are not the problem, except for the people brought over on the US H1B visa program. They make significantly less and it’s no accident that they are usually people of color, often from India.
This is what’s true: off-shoring must be very very carefully managed. When companies insist on paying a fraction of what would be paid to a US-based worker, they get what they pay for; coders who are paid to deliver code quickly. When fast is privileged over good, you get crap code. To the point where it can become cheaper to bring the work back to the US.
A very large part of my current job is remediating the severe problems caused by this ethos.
It’s also true that as the Indian offshore teams got trained in good development practices by US based workers, they expected more money. Salaries rose and now companies are looking to the Philippines because salaries are lower there than in India.
We’ve been talking about discrimination against women in the workplace for 30 years and longer. The wage gap in the US remains pretty much what it was when the issue was first pointed out.
What has happened, time and again, is that US companies complain about a talent gap and swear they need more H1B visas issued. So they continue to fail to hire women and older workers.
It’s also not entirely correct to say, well, all the women can go work for the women-run startups! But there’s a gender penalty there too. Start ups with women are told not to mention the women leaders and told not to allow the women to pitch to the VCs. Why? Because as soon as there is a woman led start up, there is no funding.
The problem exists at every level that matters for getting a business off the ground and running, and women pay a steep, steep penalty. It’s not only a lower quality experience, it’s a no-experience-at-all. If you are a woman looking to get a startup funded, it’s probably not going to happen.
Let’s talk about the complete disregard facebook, Google, and Twitter have for issues that impact women; Abuse, revenge pictures, rape-threats, the insistence on “real names” when women are disproportionally stalked and threatened and have legitimate reasons to keep their real identities private. Not one of these companies takes this seriously, because it doesn’t happen to them, so it’s not a problem they can see. If there were women in these companies whose experience and contributions were given the respect they deserve, these conditions are very likely to have been addressed from the start.
does anyone have the link to the NPR article/podcast? thanks!!
I taught myself VB/VBA in the 90s and PerfectScript back when WordPerfect *sob* ruled the world; the companies I worked with were primarily women-owned and staffed. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do it, that my contribution wouldn’t be welcome, valued or equitably compensated. It seems I was lucky to have avoided the craziness that has taken hold today.
At 60, I’m learning Linux as a hobby, to stretch myself and see what I can do. To any language majors out there, I say: go for it. Coding is syntax and rules and logic, it’s simply another language, and, holy cow, is it fun. There must be some good companies to work for out there, we just have to find them.
@IAM JSON: “Start ups with women are told not to mention the women leaders and told not to allow the women to pitch to the VCs. Why? Because as soon as there is a woman led start up, there is no funding.”
When I left corporate, one of my side gigs was coaching and prepping entrepreneurs to pitch to VCs. Some of the start ups wanted me on the pitch team specifically BECAUSE I was female (they had female target markets and the VCs didn’t trust men to truly know the female market).
Many of my big breaks in business were supported by male VCs. A male VC is why I host a number of business blogs (under different pen names). He wanted to see more female business bloggers.
The average VC is tough as nails and very difficult to sell to (it is the very rare company that gets VC funding – this company usually has a history of strong and growing sales) but he/she isn’t a rule-follower.
Does bias exist? Yes, of course, it exists. Everyone has a bias (I tend to support female-run businesses more than I support male-run businesses).
Is the world more dangerous for women? Of course, it is. As one of the few female business bloggers, I receive death threats daily. In the early days, one of my best friends, a fellow female business blogger, was brutally attacked at her home. (This is one of the reasons why you don’t see my face anywhere on the ‘net.)
But IMHO, as you pointed out, the coder shortage issue has more to do with outsourcing than bias. That totally messed up the supply/demand ratio, throwing everything off.
There’s this fascinating research in learning about how that which we unconsciously absorb, unless explicitly and consciously challenged, will be the pattern we fall back on.
It is the only reason I can think of as to why some CEO’s cling to a model where people don’t have a right to actual lives. When all the stats and research I’ve seen say that balanced lives leads to better output.
And on the gender-imbalance issue: How many professions started out as “female” because of they could be paid starvation wages or no man would take such an undignified work? There’s the “computers” (just read the review of “Talk Sweetly to Me”), Pickering’s harem in astronomy, the first programmers in the US military (“Amazing” Grace Hopper, to start with). Or hell, dealing with a household budget. And yet, people still tend to assume that mathematics and the female brain don’t often mix well.
@Cynthia Sax:
Cynthia, if you want to see the real figures of gender imbalance/discrimination, look at
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/21/eight-charts-that-put-tech-companies-diversity-stats-into-perspective/
This makes the point, very clearly, that it is a white male world, any personal exceptions nonwithstanding.
I am in a place where I am not discriminated against. I do good work, and I am appreciated and rewarded. And I am happy where I am. Yet I am still in an environment where I am looked down slightly by many people because I chose a career track which allows me to do 40 hour weeks (except for occasional emergencies). The “prestigious” track requires 80+ hour weeks – something I was initially unwilling, and now unable to do because of personal circumstances. I refused other job opportunities because of unreasonable expectations. And, if I may say so myself, it’s those other companies’ loss – I am really good at what I do, I am just unwilling/unable to do the crazy workweek routine. I know other people in the same situation – it skews towards women or older people with families, but also includes talented and experienced men with families who want to have reasonable life balance. Or, option 2 – having lots of experience, but not “hot modern” skills. And so many companies seem to want to have someone with all skills now, and are unwilling to take someone with experience (which is a huge benefit), but who may need some time to train up.
So yes, the problem indeed is of the tech’s companies own making, and the solution is diversifying and changing strategy – and valuing the fact that diversity brings experience, and that is a good thing.
@IAM
There’s research to suggest that women are less likely to push the limits when negotiating salary and less likely to push for more and bigger raises. When I worked in finance in a big consulting firm and knew lots of salaries, I was surprised at how aggressive many of the men were is asking for more money and how often they got it.
I’m not trying to suggest that lower salaries are the fault of the women, but I do think the lesson is ask for more, ask again, ask what goals you need to achieve to get more, point out your value, compare your salary to others in the organization, ask for more, back up your request, ask for more. Rinse and repeat.
@SAO: “There’s research to suggest that women are less likely to push the limits when negotiating salary and less likely to push for more and bigger raises.”
When I was in corporate, I’d push for a raise every time my male mentors would push for a raise. My female buddies would ask at review time (once a year – when everyone else was asking and the entire company was scrutinizing salary increases). I asked at least once a quarter (depending on my results). Yes, I was turned down often but it did make a difference. After 10 years, my salary was DOUBLE their salary.
I’m not saying there isn’t a bias against women (there’s a reason why there hasn’t been a female President even though women are over half of the population) or unequal pay but there are some things we, as individuals, can do to make a difference. Asking for equal pay and a pay increase is an action step we can do right now.