General > General Technical Chat
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
madires:
--- Quote from: james_s on August 23, 2022, 10:08:17 pm ---A friend of mine is a fairly senior manager of a very large, very well known software company. He told me a while back that they have an official policy that he cannot hire a white male unless he can demonstrate that he tried to find a qualified diversity candidate. Bonuses are in some way tied to the level of diversity on the teams, with "diversity" meaning specifically race and gender. The company I work for has a similar policy in that people of certain races and gender are given a shortcut to the head of the line in the interviewing process.
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So the management tries to enforce diversity by discriminating white males. :palm: Maybe white males should start suing those companies for discrimination. >:D
paulca:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 24, 2022, 09:55:53 am ---Did not do managerial work long because it did not agree with me that well. Can work with others but rather work alone 8)
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Interesting to hear. I am being politely "herded" towards management. I stated quite a while ago that I would like to remain firmly on the "technical ladder", which every company I've worked in has had, the 'technical practices ladder' and the 'management ladder'. You are of course free to hop either way, if you can meet the requirements.
In the new company (we got bought a year ago). Seem to blur this a lot, by attaching company values to roles and even as you go up the technical ladder, management topics like "delivery contract awareness, commercial awareness, team leadership, people management, business stakeholder meeting involvement, business case documentation".... etc. So at the level of senior architect you need to basically be pen pushing an agile team or several, while spending the rest of your time in management meetings on contracts, commercials and delivery of said teams, with net 0% time actually available to technically involve yourself enough in those teams day-2-day to even provide technical mentorship, except in the broadest academic sense.
I can work WITH people. I can drive people towards a technical goal. I can mentor people. I love mentoring people, I love passing on information, knowledge, skills, experience. I love broadening people and making them better engineers. But, I can't MANAGE people. I can't manage myself! My private life is a complete bomb site, my profressional self management can best be described as "How did I get to where I am?". I forget things, I over context switch when given more than 2 tasks of equal priority, I hate deligating tasks I don't know how to do! I hate estimating, I hate being timeboxed, I hate that management do NOT understand that engineering is not a mechanical machine you put requirements in the top, pull a handle a fixed number of times and a product pops out. We don't know how long it's going to take, because we've never done it before. If we HAD of done it before we would have 'canned' the code as a library and written patterns so we don't have to do it again, that's the whole core ethos of the past 30 years, "Never write the same code twice!", so how are we meant to know how long it's going to take? It's not a science it's a creative art.
Management should be see us as customers, not be our masters (used in the academic sense of above in hierarchy).
So... you see why pushing me into management is pushing me into failure.
EDIT: For incorrect gramar spoiling meaning
tszaboo:
--- Quote from: paulca on August 24, 2022, 09:50:19 am ---On the economics of equity in the workplace. "Equal job", "Equal pay".
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I don't think anyone disagrees with it. Let me ask you this question then:
You have a company, that's goal is to make as much profit as possible.
They claim, that woman make 70% of the pay of men.
So a company's best interest would be to hire as many woman as possible, since they are cheaper. Or offering equal pay, and getting better candidates. They would make it a policy, since they can save money on HR.
So something just doesn't add up. Either the job is not equally done, or maybe it has something to do with the facts that men work longer hours. Or that 92% of workspace injuries are men.
How about equal pay to equal value, instead of equal pay to equal job title.
paulca:
--- Quote from: tszaboo on August 24, 2022, 10:10:35 am ---So something just doesn't add up. Either the job is not equally done, or maybe it has something to do with the facts that men work longer hours. Or that 92% of workspace injuries are men.
How about equal pay to equal value, instead of equal pay to equal job title.
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You could have just left it at: "it has something to do with the facts that people aren't equal".
Certainly if you equate the word equal with the concept of identity and if you don't, then you have to define your equality operator and define it's meaning, it becomes a filter for a predicate comparison and not one of try equality. In code we might use a "Comparator" pattern for this, not an equality operator.
It's amazing how much of my trade involves discrimination. It's probably 90% of the actual day, to day patterns I handle and solve. I handle the concepts of comparableness, equality, identity, uniqueness, correlation, classification, categorization, set analysis, venn analysis, distribution analysis, collections theory, information theory, daily.
So I get awfully confused these days when I read a DEI email or a news report and I'm and 100% bound to screw up somewhere these days.
I had a mentoring session with 4 developers the other day discussing child process management. How to handle termination of child processes, avoiding patricide as it will result in zombies and discussing how to find said orphans and kill them before they call join on their parent and go zombie. It went on for an hour and the number of times someone said something like "kill all the children", such as in the example.... "If you kill the parent, we need to be sure that it first kills all of it's children, allows them to join it before terminating itself."
I wondered how that meeting would have gone if a DEI rep was in it.
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: paulca on August 24, 2022, 10:09:11 am ---Interesting to hear. I am being politely "herded" towards management. I stated quite a while ago that I would like to remain firmly on the "technical ladder", which every company I've worked in has had, the 'technical practices ladder' and the 'management ladder'. You are of course free to hop either way, if you can meet the requirements.
.....
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I can see that being a big burden. On the other hand also stupid of the people "herding" you when it ain't your forte. Look to me they are a bit blind, or you hide it very well.
The managerial role was within a company that hired me while being self employed. Did not make a big difference and they thought I was fit for the job. There was still a fair balance between technical and managerial work, but the endless never to the point meetings, ugh :palm:
I left due to us moving to the south. The Rotterdam region was getting more and more crowded and we did not like that. New work came along from another direction. Writing software from home for an English company, and later system management for another company. Liked the first hated the latter, but it brought me where I am today.
The only advise I can give here is to try and stay on the technical side of work, the stress will eat you up otherwise. Make sure to take time for yourself. I did not and it might be the base of my illness (CFS/FM), but that is something the doctors can't confirm.
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