Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins to Protest A Broken Job Interview Process

Adrianne Jeffries | The Outline | 28 February 2017

“David Heinemeier Hansson, a well-known programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails coding framework, was the one who started it.

“Hello, my name is David,” he wrote on Twitter. “I look code up on the internet all the time.”

Immediately, other techies picked up the meme. “Hello my name is Sadiksha, I am working on rails since 2011. I don’t know migrations syntax to add/remove column, I google it everytime,” one coder said. “Hello, my name is Tim. I’m a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string,” tweeted another.”

Read more here.

Closing the gender gap in tech at Green River

Andy Orr |Auburn Reporter | 27 February 2017

“When Tina Ostrander joined Green River College in 2014 to help launch a bachelor’s degree in software development, she set a lofty goal for the program: reach 50/50 female/male enrollment by 2020.

“Software development is one of the fastest growing fields in the country. It doesn’t make any sense to have half the workforce missing out economically on the advantages software careers have to offer,” Ostrander said. “Women are oftentimes deterred from pursuing tech careers, especially in their formative years, so we at Green River see it as a core mission to create a degree program and a student experience that not only excites, but retains, women in computing pathways.”

Ostrander knows from experience. With more than 20 years of computer science and web development teaching experience, she’s graduated countless students who have gone on to pursue exciting careers in tech. Her own daughter, Hannah, also studied computer science and now works as a technical product manager at Expedia.”

Read more here.

 

Melinda Gates is on a mission to boost women in tech fields

Sandi Doughton | The Seattle Times | 20 February 2017

“Melinda Gates has some advice for tech workers flooding into Seattle for jobs at Amazon and other cutting-edge companies: Do your part to make the field more diverse.

“Look around you, look in your group and ask yourself: How many women are on your team?” the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said in a recent interview with The Seattle Times. “If it’s less than two, that’s probably too few.”

Gates, who made global access to birth control and women’s empowerment top priorities at the world’s richest foundation, is now launching a personal crusade to bring more women into computer science — the field where she got her start.”

Read more here.

 

Tech still struggles with diversity, despite $1.2B in investments, report says

Luke Stangel | Puget Sound Business Journal | 13 February 2017

“Virtually every major Silicon Valley technology company struggles to hire black, Latino and Native American engineers, despite high-profile programs designed to attract more diverse candidates to the hiring pool, a new report says.

Blacks and Latinos make up just 5.3 percent of the workforce at the average technology company — roughly 16 to 18 percentage points behind their representation in the overall U.S. workforce. The disparity is even higher in senior leadership positions in tech, where an estimated 83.3 percent of executives are white, according to a new report from OpenMIC, a nonprofit that advocates for diverse media.”

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Fortune 500 companies make short strides toward broader diversity: study

Gina Hall | Puget Sound Business Journal | 6 February 2017

“HP Inc. and Wells Fargo have the broadest diversity on their boards, according to a new study, even as other Fortune 500 companies have only made small strides toward inclusion.

HP Inc.’s (NYSE: HPQ) board has the broadest range in diversity, according to the Alliance for Board Diversity and professional services firm Deloitte(PDF). Out of 13 total board seats at the Palo Alto, California-based tech firm, five are occupied by women, two members are black, three are Asian/Pacific Islander and one is Hispanic/Latino.”

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Autism becoming an increasing value in age of diversity hires

Leah Eichler | The Globe and Mail | 4 February 2017

“Autism in popular culture has come along way since the days of Rain Man.

Rather than a savant, today’s perception of those on the autism spectrum seems closer to that of an adorable or quirky genius, such as Jim Parsons’s portrayal of Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, or Benedict Cumberbatch’s depiction of Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock. In other words, the changing perception of the disorder implies an intellectual benefit. But will that perception eventually penetrate the work force, so that the condition is viewed as more of an asset than liability? To some, the value of possessing a brain on the spectrum is already clear.

“Neither of my two successful ventures would have ever been created if I had a ‘normal’ mind,’” insists Andreas Souvaliotis, 53, founder and chief executive of Carrot Insights, which runs Carrot Rewards, a wellness-rewards platform in Toronto. Mr. Souvaliotis explained his unique ability with numbers was the impetus for his Green Rewards business 10 years ago, an ecopoints program sold to Loyalty One.”

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4 Proven Strategies for Hiring a Diverse Team

Adam Rowe | Tech.co | 3 February 2017

“Culture can be a tricky thing: Those who don’t fit into a culture are implicitly or explicitly encouraged to move on, but the end result can be a stagnation. The ideal culture should be one that is free to evolve and include others without losing itself. When it doesn’t, long-outdated cultural norms stick around.

Case in point: institutional sexism in tech workplaces. Take one recent survey on Seattle’s tech environment, released yesterday:

“Men and women in Seattle startups agree that men have more opportunities for advancement and typically fit in better with their company’s culture, according to a survey focused on gender of employees at smaller, growing companies.”

In order to avoid the gender-gap problem as well as a lack of diversity in general, a startup’s culture-building needs to be intentional. But that’s a complex process to get right. Here are a few tips from a company that’s managed to pull it off: More than 50 percent of GetMyBoat‘s San Francisco team is female, and four of their 10 developers are underrepresented minorities.

These proven strategies for hiring a diverse team come from Tech.Co’s interview with GetMyBoat’s CTO.”

Read more here.