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Was firing an over-reaction?Was firing an over-reaction?Posted Mar 29, 2013 6:46 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)In reply to: Was firing an over-reaction? by nix Parent article: Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
> Hint: doubling your employment pool by hiring people without
> regard for sex is a good thing for the employer for hopefully > obvious reasons.
All other things being equal your statement is of course quite correct. But they aren't always like your textbook out in the real world.
Lets push an example to an extreme.. kinda like you do in the next one... and see where it might lead to a different conclusion.
We all know programmers tend to be a) a bit wierd, b) overwhelmingly male and c) tend to be socially inept in general and especially in interactions with MOTOS. We also know (heck, I know well enough from direct experience, know several at least as good at IT things as myself) that women can program but they are even less represented at the extreme high end than they are in general. We also know that those few extreme programmers can often produce more output than a dozen or more normal ones. The "A bit wierd" factor seems to correlate with the high output.
Theory holds that women and men are equal, thus adding women to a team shouldn't matter. But the reality above disagrees, adding women to an existing team of males (especially in this industry) always seems to involve drama, sensitivity/diversity training and changing the work environment in general to allow maternity leave, no more death marches, etc., all of which impact productivity. Btw, if you only apply the new kinder and gentler rules to the females, kiss moral goodbye. And if you figure the odds are non-trivial that one or more of your twitchy but highly productive ones will get sacked in an HR incident to boot, perhaps the wise course for a manager IS to exclude half the talent pool, pulling whatever tricks are required to keep the EEOC in the dark.
Discuss. And try to keep it rational. What proposed changes in social conditions would best work to mitigate/eliminate the perverse incentives in that scenario?
> a race to the bottom where your competitors outcompete you
Good grief, that is so epic stupid you must be college educated. That can only happen as a pathological extreme of an imbalance of supply and demand of labor, and guess what; given the condition the result WILL happen. But if labor isn't so abundant that employers can do that labor will always be able to bid up their price with or without unions even. Especially in industries like ours.
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Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 29, 2013 15:21 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] adding women to an existing team of males (especially in this industry) always seems to involve drama, sensitivity/diversity trainingIf it involves 'drama' the people causing the 'drama' need to grow up and realize that half the human race is female. If sensitivity training is even *needed* to interact with women this is even more true (FWIW I have never had any such training at any point, nor have I heard of it existing in the UK outside organizations in recovery mode from situations where actual sexual harrassment has been going on: this may be a US-specific insanity). changing the work environment in general to allow maternity leave, no more death marchesGood! Organizations that do not acknowledge that their employees have families and that those families deserve priority at times do not deserve to exist (and there is such a thing as paternity leave in decent organizations and sane countries, too: men have families as well, and expecting them to ignore a new child in favour of the latest deadline is inhuman). Organizations that are so incompetent at planning that frequent death marches are necessary do not deserve to exist (they're harming their employees by doing that, of whichever gender). That can only happen as a pathological extreme of an imbalance of supply and demand of laborYeah. That is a very frequent case in many industries: after all, there are always more people waiting at the gates. Guess why it doesn't happen? Because of, gasp, regulation preventing it from taking hold.
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 29, 2013 17:01 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> nor have I heard of it existing in the UK
Here in the US diversity/sensitivity training is a huge industry. Huge.
> there are always more people waiting at the gates.
Why? If wage rates drop people lose interest in training to enter it. There is a bit of a lag but a lot of people entered IT because they heard they pay was good. If pay ever dropped a lot those who came for the money and not because they have a burning desire for it would quickly leave.
Same theory applies in most industries. Here where I live the job most people without a degree lust for is the offshore oil & gas industry. It isn't because they love oil, they love the fact it is the highest paying industry in the area. If they cut the pay back few would line up for a shot at spending weeks at a time on an offshore platform. They pay that good because the job requires a certain sort of person, the sort who won't screw up, blow up a multi-billion dollar oil platform and rack up untold more billions in enviromental and PR damage. In other words, they don't need a degree but they do need clue and stability.
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 29, 2013 20:16 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> Here in the US diversity/sensitivity training is a huge industry. Huge.
Large companies have mandatory training for every employee once a year on diversity/sensitivity training.
A couple of years ago, the web-based training module at my company wouldn't let you complete the training in less than an hour. Even if you read everything (instead of watching the videos), if you finished in less than an hour, it forced you to keep interacting with it until an hour of interaction had completed.
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