You say this, but I’ve been on 5 two-pizza teams over the course of my career, and there were other women on every team except the 2 most toxic ones. My current team at a large fortune 500 is majority women. I realize this may not reflect the entire industry, and some fields may be more male dominated than others. But there are a lot of women programmers out there. You just need to pay them well and give them a good work life balance and they’ll work for you.
I do agree that there’s more we could do to attract women. The company I work for is known for good WLB so I don’t think that’s the issue. We only hire senior people every few years and I’m pretty sure we only offer market value, so it’s possible that is a problem.
That said, I think we actually have more women on dev teams than most companies do. Especially the back end teams, maybe because we have a lot more women in the engineering leadership there. It’s our FE teams, which are led almost entirely by men, where we have fewer women. So if we did start hiring again I’d really like to see us bring in more women at the top.
I’ve interviewed around 20 people since I started working here and only 3 candidates were women-- I don’t have any control over who the recruiter sends our way, so I don’t really know what kind of bias could be going on there. So it’s possible that’s a problem too.
All that said, hiring good engineers is really competitive and I think we do struggle against FAANG-likes already. Even though we have a lot of good benefits we have a reputation for being super boring and proprietary (think enterprise software like Oracle, but not Oracle thankfully), which turns a ton of people off. So it’s not easy to attract talented people to start with.
You say this, but I’ve been on 5 two-pizza teams over the course of my career, and there were other women on every team except the 2 most toxic ones. My current team at a large fortune 500 is majority women. I realize this may not reflect the entire industry, and some fields may be more male dominated than others. But there are a lot of women programmers out there. You just need to pay them well and give them a good work life balance and they’ll work for you.
I do agree that there’s more we could do to attract women. The company I work for is known for good WLB so I don’t think that’s the issue. We only hire senior people every few years and I’m pretty sure we only offer market value, so it’s possible that is a problem.
That said, I think we actually have more women on dev teams than most companies do. Especially the back end teams, maybe because we have a lot more women in the engineering leadership there. It’s our FE teams, which are led almost entirely by men, where we have fewer women. So if we did start hiring again I’d really like to see us bring in more women at the top.
I’ve interviewed around 20 people since I started working here and only 3 candidates were women-- I don’t have any control over who the recruiter sends our way, so I don’t really know what kind of bias could be going on there. So it’s possible that’s a problem too.
All that said, hiring good engineers is really competitive and I think we do struggle against FAANG-likes already. Even though we have a lot of good benefits we have a reputation for being super boring and proprietary (think enterprise software like Oracle, but not Oracle thankfully), which turns a ton of people off. So it’s not easy to attract talented people to start with.