Code.org: More Money For CS Instructors Who Teach More Girls

theodp writes "The same cast of billionaire characters — Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt — is backing FWD.us, which is lobbying Congress for more visas to 'meet our workforce needs,' as well as Code.org, which aims to popularize Computer Science education in the U.S. to address a projected CS job shortfall. In laying out the two-pronged strategy for the Senate, Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith argued that providing more kids with a STEM education — particularly CS — was 'an issue of critical importance to our country.' But with its K-8 learn-to-code program which calls for teachers to receive 25% less money if fewer than 40% of their CS students are girls, Smith's Code.org is sending the message that training too many boys isn't an acceptable solution to the nation's CS crisis. 'When 10 or more students complete the course,' explains Code.org, "you will receive a $750 DonorsChoose.org gift code. If 40% or more of your participating students are female, you'll receive an additional $250, for a total gift of $1,000 in DonorsChoose.org funding!" The $1+ million Code.org-DonorsChoose CS education partnership appears to draw inspiration from a $5 million Google-DoonorsChoose STEM education partnership which includes nebulous conditions that disqualify schools from AP STEM funding if projected participation by female students in AP STEM programs is deemed insufficient. So, are Zuckerberg, Gates, Ballmer, and Schmidt walking-the-gender-diversity-talk at their own companies? Not according to the NY Times, which just reported that women still account for only about 25% of all employees at Code.org supporters Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. By the way, while not mentioning these specific programs, CNET reports that Slashdot owner Dice supports the STEM efforts of Code.org and Donors Choose."

Comments

Horse, meet water

[korbulon]

Now drink.

Re:Horse, meet water

[immaterial]

Sorry, Billy. Can't have you in the class. It would jeapordize my bonus...

Re:Horse, meet water

[Cryacin]

Funny how companies scream about too much regulation and artificial legislation, until they do the regulation and artificial legislation.

Re:Horse, meet water

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the sad reality playing out for minor sports in college. If a school cannot find enough women who are willing to play sports, they have to start cutting men's sports. Can we require students sign a contract that they will play sports for the first two years? Since women had made up the majority of students on college campuses for a generation, this would ensure plenty of women participating in sports.

Re:Horse, meet water

[epyT-R]

Yes.. this is the feminist definition of 'equality' defined in title 9. If 30 guys want to play a sport that has a minimum of 15 players, and only 9 girls sign up for the girl's team, it doesn't happen. Of course, if this applied the other way around, the 'womyn' would be screaming in 'outrage.'

Re:Horse, meet water

[Gamer_2k4]

Shareholders have purchased a part in a company because they support its vision and actions. The people that "own" the government, on the other hand, have no choice in being taxed, and half of them are always going to be against what the government decides to do.

I guarantee you that if a company went against the wishes of half its shareholders, you'd hear about it.

Re:Horse, meet water

[TheRaven64]

And the problem here is awarding academic funding to people because they're good at non-academic activities. How about decoupling them entirely? Seems to work everywhere else...

There is no "shortfall".

[Animats]

There is no "shortfall" of coders. There's just a glut of employers who want just-in-time employees cheap. Ones they can lay off at any time. Ones they don't have to send to training classes.

Women went into IT in the late 1990s, when it looked like a good career choice. Now it isn't, so they don't.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company who would love to hire good coders. They pay well, hire permanently, and have no problem sending people to a few training courses.

All employees have to work on a 4 month contract first though, as a sort of test. The vast majority are useless, as is evident during that trial phase. We have no trouble finding resumes, but have significant trouble finding good coders.

The shortfall isn't in occupation, it's in talent. At least my own job security is good.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[alexhs]

I guess that they're trying to solve the mythical man-month conundrum by having women instead.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[hawguy]

I work for a company who would love to hire good coders. They pay well, hire permanently, and have no problem sending people to a few training courses.

All employees have to work on a 4 month contract first though, as a sort of test. The vast majority are useless, as is evident during that trial phase. We have no trouble finding resumes, but have significant trouble finding good coders.

The shortfall isn't in occupation, it's in talent. At least my own job security is good.

Maybe your 4 month contract requirement is weeding out the good coders that don't want to give up a full-time job for a 4 month test that may leave them without a job if they don't live up to some hard to quantify metric of "good enough". And apparently most people fail your test and end up out on the street after the 4 months.

A full time job is no guarantee of future employment, of course, but I doubt I'd be willing to take a contract job that "might" turn into a full time job in 4 months.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[Anonymous Coward]

So... who do you work for? The shortfall is lack of cheap brilliant talent willing to work in substandard conditions. There are more STEM graduates than open jobs. Over 50% of IT leaves for other fields because of lack of pay and working conditions.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[Charliemopps]

Exactly right, they've decided that they should be able to pay their software engineers slightly above what McDonald's workers make. So they looked at McDonald's workers and determined they could be paid so little because there are so many of them... viola, we needs lots and lots of coders so there is more competition in the workforce and we can therefore pay them less. I don't know any company that's having trouble finding programers, but I know LOTS of programers that can't find jobs. The idea that this is some sort of noble cause they're fighting to help anyone but them selves is a joke.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[khasim]

Maybe your 4 month contract requirement is weeding out the good coders that don't want to give up a full-time job for a 4 month test that may leave them without a job if they don't live up to some hard to quantify metric of "good enough".

Too bad I don't have mod points. That's exactly the case.

Think about EVERYTHING that a good programmer has with an average employer.
Paycheck
Medical
Dental
Vacation
And so forth.

Is the 4 month contract paying so much to offset the other disadvantages? Primarily VACATION. Because 4 months means that Christmas and such will happen if the contract starts from September through December. Which puts the ending from December through March. That's HALF the year right there.

And if the programmer has kids then summer vacation is an issue as well.

Hey, just give up on your family for 4 months while we "evaluate" you.

And hope that you and your family are very healthy during those 4 months because health insurance is expensive.

So what the "testing" is really doing is selecting for younger coders without experience who are willing to take on such contracts to build up their resumes.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[gagol]

viola = raped, the word you are thinking about is voila.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe your 4 month contract requirement is weeding out the good coders that don't want to give up a full-time job for a 4 month test that may leave them without a job if they don't live up to some hard to quantify metric of "good enough". And apparently most people fail your test and end up out on the street after the 4 months.

These types of "test periods" are often just a disguise for temporary work, they don't actually plan on ever keeping anyone on permanently. They disguise it like this so the people think that if they do a really good job they'll have a better chance... but they don't. It's a good way to get a lot of productivity out of a temp worker, and a lot of more naive coders will contribute some of their best work.
Then you kick them down the road, you don't have to pay out expensive benefits, retirement, severance, etc. and can brag about how you only hire permanent, full-time positions.

Most good coders avoid such shops like the plague- it's just screaming "take advantage of me".

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[Bengie]

Most people I've met can't be good coders because of their mindset. They just want something to work, they don't care about how or why and they take no pride. Nothing like trying to tell a another programmer why their design isn't good because they don't understand how the hardware works. Why use a hashtable when you can use a linked list? They both get the job done. Who cares if the design will triple the number of round trips to the DB, who cares that the DB tables are flat and unnormalized, who cares that there are no sprocs. It works, right? That seems to be 80% of the people I've met.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[Charliemopps]

I think it works either way actually.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[Krishnoid]

This way they can prove their developers wrong by actually getting nine of them pregnant.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[russotto]

I can actually see why there are, actually. Not necessarily coders, but STEM in particular.

http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/09/004251/us-adults-score-poorly-on-worldwide-test

You really can't have it both ways on this one slashdot. Either:

We're doing pretty damn shitty at producing competent engineers and we need to import talent via H-1B.

Or:

Our education system is just fantastic and therefore H-1B visas are unnecessary.

False dilemma. Our education system can suck on average and still produce plenty of competent engineers. The US has a very stratified education system; there's the school systems in poor areas which produce illiterates, and the school systems in wealthy areas which have pretty decent results.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[professionalfurryele]

Or we're doing pretty damn shitty at producing competent engineers and we need to fix out education system and what we value as a society to reward STEM.

I promise you if scientists are engineers are making six figures, cant move for members of the sex they are attracted to swamping them with offers of sexual favours and are talked about the way Kim Kardashian is there would be no need to worry about a shortage of talented people wanting to work in STEM.

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[russotto]

Don't knock it. We've hired a buncha folks lately, and frankly, the quality of the "average developer" these days is horrible. About a decade or so ago, you might have to go through a dozen or so interviews before finding someone who is at least a good code monkey, but these days, you have to go through at least 30 or so applicants to find someone who is even remotely competent (like ability to open an editor and write a hello world program competent).

There is definitely a skills shortage. I doubt it can be solved by importing folks from other places, or whatnot. Education really needs to step up.... way too many folks get the degrees (or pretend degrees) without knowing the basics.

There's not a skills shortage, there's an idiot surplus. The good ones are still there, but thanks to overall economic conditions there's a lot more idiots applying so you have to sift through more idiots to find people you want. (HR policies which select for idiots and (especially) liars don't help).

Re:There is no "shortfall".

[CodeBuster]

If they get past that, ask them how heap sort works.

Heapsort? I doubt that most CS graduate students could code up heapsort on the spot if you ambushed them with that question. This is the kind of question that interviewers ask to make themselves look smart without realizing that it makes them look like a smart ass. If they have a CS degree from a reputable school you can safely assume that sorting was covered. It's rarely an issue in commercial code because efficient sorting is a built in feature of just about every commercial software framework in common use. If you really must weed out the people who absolutely cannot code, just throw FizzBuzz at them. It's effective and serves essentially the same purpose without annoying (or eliminating) otherwise decent candidates.

How can those incentives help?

[SuperKendall]

First of all, I too really want to see more females working in the tech industry. I think it's one of the more female friendly work environments around, especially since the experience can be so tailored to your interests.

That said, I don't see how those incentives are healthy or really help anything. I don't think everyone would enjoy or be good at coding; so incentives that make instructors coerce people into entering a programming class mean fewer spots for people who would enjoy and benefit from the class.

Instead we need to focus on efforts that get females to seek out classes like this (efforts like AppCampForGirls) , not get instructors to lure females into the class...

Re:How can those incentives help?

[SuperKendall]

I used that term because I didn't want to imply only grownup women. "Females" to me implies, well females of all ages... just as I would use the term male to refer to males of all ages. Since you are so wise, what is a better term? "Women" implies only adults, and the only way the problem is solved is if teenage (and younger) girls also become serious coders...

Re:How can those incentives help?

[__aaltlg1547]

Maybe if they could get more instructors to see the benefits of luring girls...

Re:How can those incentives help?

[TrollstonButterbeans]

" I think it's one of the more female friendly work environments around, especially since the experience can be so tailored to your interests."

Please explain how it is a female friendly work environment.

In my experience, a female friendly work environment has these characteristics:

1) Fixed schedule. (No)

2) Few strings (No -- tech expects you to be consonantly available even during off hours)

3) Stable (Tech is constantly changing = No)

4) Long time with one employer (Again, no ... it can happen, but tech is the opposite of a static environment)

You have the assertion it is a female friendly work environment --- I don't see in what ways this is true. Unless you see something not mentioned (or are referring to tech in a very relaxed and uncompetitive environment like government?)

Teaching programmer?

[TechyImmigrant]

I don't know a single competent programmer that started programming because someone taught them how. They started programming because they wanted to.

Manipulating teachers isn't going change that outcome.

 

Re:Teaching programmer?

[Sneftel]

You don't know a single competent programmer who just started programming just because they wanted to. They started programming because they had the opportunity to, and the support. And if manipulating teachers is effective in countering their (probably unconscious, but nevertheless well-researched and documented) bias towards offering opportunity and support towards mostly boys, then it's the right thing to do.

Re:Teaching programmer?

[fredprado]

You don't know a single competent programmer who just started programming just because they wanted to. They started programming because they had the opportunity to, and the support.

Bullshit, I self taught myself. I had no teacher and my parents were computer illiterate, and many of the greatest programmers I know followed the exact same pattern.

And keep in mind that there wasn't the internet then, I had to learn from the few books on the subject I could acquire or borrow in the public library. Today all you need is access to a computer and to an Internet connection.

probably unconscious, but nevertheless well-researched and documented

Sorry to pop your bubble, but the only documented bias that exist these days is against male students, and in every field of knowledge, not only in CS, and it is a bias reinforced by initiatives like this.

Re:Teaching programmer?

[CronoCloud]

Oh, you don't know of the time in the past, like say the 80's when a lot of Slashdotters were growing up...that the commodore 64 that was bought for them... wouldn't have been if they were girls? Or that the computer was basically "their computer" because at that time computers/video games were considered "boy toys"

yes it's better now, but there are still remnants of that thinking left.

Re:Teaching programmer?

[TechyImmigrant]

BS. Opportunity is exactly what it says on the box. Schools have been offering opportunity for decades. There is and always has been a strong gender bias in the opportunities that children choose to take advantage of when given a free choice.

What is wrong is denying opportunity, so that a motivated children don't get to pursue their muse. Trying to shovel less boys and more girls into a particular subject, that was available anyway is neither enhancing opportunity nor motivating more pupils in any particular direction. The motivation comes from somewhere else.

Re:Teaching programmer?

[VortexCortex]

You don't know a single competent programmer who just started programming just because they wanted to. They started programming because they had the opportunity to, and the support.

Negative. I came from a poor family. No money. In elementary school I put an Apple IIe disk in upside down by accident. A BASIC prompt appeared and I started typing stuff into it. I discovered the LIST command and all the instructions went flying up the screen, for pages and pages. Eventually I learned how to edit those lines of code and by changing values here and there I learned how the functions were called. This was in the computer lab -- We were supposed to be playing some shitty games. My teacher had no clue what was going on with me, but I was quiet and that's all that mattered. I begged my neighbors for any kind of work to do for money, and purchased my own PC part by part. They come with instructions, and I knew how to read. By highschool where "Vocational Computer Applications" was finally taught I was already selling my software on Compuserve. Everyone online today has a web browser -- It's a scripting engine for JavaScript like the Apple IIe was for BASIC. Kids now have free online information and compilers. If you make it to Highschool without writing code first, you probably won't ever be a programmer. It's just too damn easy, and for folks who want to learn -- Nothing can stop them. Not even being surrounded by morons like you.

Re:Teaching programmer?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Because 151/2 is 75.5. Sheesh, let the dude retire already.

Re:Teaching programmer?

[grep -v '.*' *]

the only documented bias that exist these days is against male students ... and it is a bias reinforced by initiatives like this.

Bias? Why there's no bias here -- just my own individual thoughts, reinforced by friends who think as I do. Away with thee, uncouth non-PC heathen!

Here's all of the support *I* had growing up. (Me, by myself, a coupon, and $5 of my parent's money. (I suspect -- I really don't remember.) The other "support" I had was my parents letting me have time to fool with it. That, of course, led to other things.

If you're really interested, you'll learn. If not, you won't. Why would you want to coerce people into doing a job they don't like? (Just for the money -- really? You're/they're that desperate?) Now force-introducing them to different jobs is a whole different story. I presume most people wouldn't like most jobs, but that's still a good thing -- you cut down on where to look for things you DO like.

All that being said, I posit that I'm a competent programmer, even if I still don't (want to know) Java.

Medical students mostly female - same measures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that most medical students are female, will the same measures be taken to punish "sexist" women doctors ?

Businesses can't hire people who don't exist.

[flaming error]

"women still account for only about 25% of all employees at Code.org supporters "

And how many unemployed female software engineers do we have who can't find work?

Businesses can't hire people who don't exist.

Re:Businesses can't hire people who don't exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Better question: what benefit do you get from having a 50% female work force? Does your code magically become better if an equal share of it is written by a woman? No. Good coders write good code. Gender has nothing to do with it, and I'm sick of seeing these efforts to artificially shift the demographics of a work force purely to meet some political agenda.

Re:Businesses can't hire people who don't exist.

[Bengie]

They tend to solve problems slightly differently, so it creates for a wider range of ideas. Quite often I find myself getting a few programmers together, discussing the problem domain, then throwing ideas. Getting a good list of ideas and their pros and cons is important.

Re:Businesses can't hire people who don't exist.

[Ol Olsoc]

Did you miss the part about training more? It's pretty much the whole summary.

There is a very odd misconception in the world today. That is the idea, that all you have to do is plug in someone, anyone, into a job slot, and the results are the same.

It certainly isn't. The question that needs asked, is do an equal amount of young women even want to become programmers?

I have participated in many "Take your sons and daughters to work" days, and have been in on the efforts to get young women interested in tech fields and engineering.

These are the daughters of tech people and engineers, so you would expect there to be some interest.

Haven't found much at all. The young ladies prefer fields like lawyers, MBA's, and medical fields. This is a sampling of hundreds.

So we are left with perhaps forcing young ladies into tech fields?

Great idea

[__aaltlg1547]

Penalize teachers for things they can't control. How do you as a teacher ensure that at least 40% of your students are girls? Throw out some boys that are interested in programming?

Re:Great idea

[TechyImmigrant]

>How do you as a teacher ensure that at least 40% of your students are girls? Throw out some boys that are interested in programming?

Yes. That's exactly how it works in NCLB. Identify the failing ones and pull them from the class or school before they start affecting your averages. This situation is no different.

Re:Great idea

[russotto]

NCLB was invented by screwballs who hadn't taught themselves and didn't understand education (or statistics). Most of them were economists who thought you could do anything by providing economic incentives.

You'd think they'd realize that while economic incentives do work, they rarely work exactly how you want them to. And I'm sure the idea that any metric used for incentives can and will be gamed has been mentioned in economic literature.

So you provide a "bug bounty", and your programmers start writing in deliberate bugs to find later. You base budgets on student success at certain tests, and teachers start teaching to the test (or outright cheating). You pay extra for a class with a certain percentage of females, and males are excluded if they'd cause the percentage to drop below that level. All quite obvious, apparently unless you're a certain sort of economist.

Other Fields?

[Anonymous Coward]

So will the same apply to nursing teachers if not enough male students enroll?

Re:Other Fields?

[Arker]

Yes, and let's not forget to fine mechanics schools that fail to recruit "enough" females and cosmetology schools that fail to recruit 'enough' males as well.

For that matter why not just make it law that whenever people gather, for any reason, at any place, at any time, there must be exact parity between the genders.

Re:Other Fields?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Some years ago (1990s I think - it was quite a while ago anyway), the University of Washington proposed what amounted to reverse affirmative action in their teaching school with the goal of increasing the number of men going into that female-dominated area. They got slapped down pretty hard by the various women's groups, and quickly back pedaled.

What's sauce for the gander is obviously not sauce for the goose.

Re:Other Fields?

[Nerdfest]

There is no "reverse discrimination", only discrimination.

Re:Other Fields?

[CronoCloud]

I think you're mistaken, last I checked those sorts of programs still existed.

Re:Other Fields?

[turkeydance]

Male Nurses are highly prized and paid well. manipulating a 350 lb. patient requires immense upper body strength.

Re:Other Fields?

[VortexCortex]

So will the same apply to nursing teachers if not enough male students enroll?

Know what? Most Janitors are men. Hey, Coal miners too. We should mandate 50% men and women in all fields of employ. You wanted to be a councelor? Sorry, we need more women coal miners. You wanted to be a programmer? Sorry, we need more male hair dressers.

TFA is bullshit. Equality isn't 50% men vs 50% women. Equality is equal opportunity, and proportional representation. If 30% of applicants are female, and 50% of accepted applicants are female, then that's not equality it's sexism. If you have the opportunity to do something -- Be a coal miner or hair dresser or romance novelist or computer programmer, etc -- and you decide NOT to do it, then we shouldn't force you to do it. It's a fact that humans are sexually dimorphic: Men have penises, women have vaginae and breasts and bear children. It's moronic to think that human brains are somehow immune to being affected by those same genes that make our bodies so different. In fact, we've observed differences in male and female brains. Neither one is better than the other. We should offer them the same set of choices -- The same opportunities; However, we shouldn't be surprised when the genders have preferences for or against different jobs. Men and women are different. Anyone who thinks otherwise can, and should, go fuck themselves.

IT and CS are kind of shitty jobs right now -- Those same fucks who are pushing for more female applicants regardless of if they want to enroll? Yeah, they're also the ones putting ads in the newspaper and turning down any qualified applicant for any reason they can only to say they meet the requirements so they can fill the jobs with the lower paid H1B visa employees they're lobbying for having more of. Penalize teachers because girls are being smart enough not to sign up for that shite? Fuck you Zuck and the elites you rode in on.

Re:Other Fields?

[RightSaidFred99]

Pedant fail. We humans have a vernacular, and part of that includes "Reverse Discrimination" meaning discrimination that goes the opposite direction of the usual perceived or real discrimination predominant in society.

So don't be an asshole, you didn't score any points.

Re:Other Fields?

[Bigbutt]

Sure, but how many male nurses are permitted in rooms with females unless they're attended by a another female? None of them? So why send a male nurse in if a female nurse has to be there anyway? And how many female nurses are permitted unattended in rooms with males? All of them? Can male nurses work on (don't know the right terminology) females in all stages of being helped? Can female nurses work on males in all stages of being helped?

[John]

What does this do?

[XB-70]

This is sexism at its very worst. Funding one gender over another only serves to create animosity between them and suppress the gender that is not given preferential treatment. Why don't we put the funding towards researching how each gender takes up information and teach to those pedagogic methodologies? Education is one of the few areas where we have made minimal progress in the last 100 years. Students are NOT getting noticeably smarter. If we achieve the ability to learn more, faster, we all will win.

Re:What does this do?

[fredprado]

I call bullshit again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

Re:What does this do?

[kecceli13]

Ok, I have to add my female two cents here amongst all this testosterone induced opinions. First, the video basically stated that scientifically, gender interests are dictated biologically with a side of nurture. Therefore nurture does have an effect on the overall outcome. I guess I must have had too much testosterone at birth or something since I like programming and don't collect purses. Anyways, I do not think that supporting female educational interests should be financially motivated. So, I don't agree that they should be handing out more money based on whether you have more girls enrolled in the class. On the other hand, as a chick whose favorite class in high school was programming it would have been nice to have more “cultural” support when choosing my degree/career. Also, you guys should realize that for a lone female joining a field that is dominated by men it is not easy and some females may shy away from CS just because of that. Which may mean the field is losing out on talent. I mean, jeez look how we always have to go to the bathroom in groups.

Re:What does this do?

[DoofusOfDeath]

testosterone induced opinions.

Real classy. Sexism and a genetic fallacy in a single three-word phrase. Bravo.

Re:What does this do?

[CronoCloud]

Certainly when I was in high school, interest in computers merely cemented my status as a geek and a nerd, before either one had any positive connotations.

Yes, but as a nerd you probably weren't that interested in social status, being more interested in your computer. While the jocks might mess around with you a little, they won't usually dedicate themselves to making your life hell. Girl-world is different, "Mean Girls" (the book), and "Queen Bee's and Wannabes" might be good reads about that.

Why are you posting as anonymous?

[khasim]

If the place is so great then name it.

The vast majority are useless, as is evident during that trial phase.

... and ...

The shortfall isn't in occupation, it's in talent.

Talent usually falls along a bell curve. And half the programmers out there will be worse than the other half of the programmers out there.

If you're having trouble finding the good programmers then you either aren't advertising the job openings enough or there is some problem with the pay/environment/project that causes the better programmers to choose other employment.

Re:Why are you posting as anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

50% of people are below average. No more, no less.

If you consider average people, and slightly above average people to be mediocre or worthless perhaps the problem is your own expectations of what constitutes baseline average?

My experience:
Employers want Rockstar talent for intern prices
Consumers want high quality products/services for Walmart/McDonalds prices
Employees want easy jobs that pay like the work is hard

It's called self-interest. It's a predictable human behavior. The innovative companies are the ones who manage to take an adversarial zero-sum game and find ways to align these conflicting objectives as much as possible(or are just so profitable & cutting edge they don't have to care yet).

The easiest ways for an employer to align these conflicting objectives is to find something other than money to incentivize employees to work more for less. This can be basic things such as flexible hours, relaxed dress code, the option to work from home one day a week(or more), or providing a "campus" like environment where they can receive personal mail & eat at their desk without any need to leave.

The managers who demand strict conformality, pay shit, and then are surprised that creativity suffers shouldn't be despised so much as looked at with amusement. Talented people have talented friends and if your employees are all so miserable that they would not recommend their employer to their peers it doesn't really surprise me you're having a hard time filling positions. Find some of the demands that do not offer a significant direct profit to you but pose a hardship on your employees which your managers are asking for because the consider them to be basic expectations. Relax them. Keep doing this until your employees are happy enough they would recommend working there to friends. "The pay isn't great but the benefits make it worth it."

The other option is to lower the barriers to entry until you can hire people that are disadvantaged yet capable enough to be grateful for peanut wages.

Great examples of this:
-smart people without degrees who are grateful for a job title(that normally requires a degree) even if they are only getting paid their education level.
-creating entry level positions and training average employees until they are great employees.

Good employees(at a fair price) are not hard to find or make, but most people want a free lunch without doing anything beyond posting an ad to monster.com

No sympathy here.
 

Vocabulary exists for a reason

[SuperKendall]

Just say women next time. Or how bout "women and girls"

"Women" as I said is inaccurate. Strunk & White would veto your sentence expanding "women and girls" when a perfectly good english word, Female, exists to cover both terms and indeed the totality of the gender.

I fail to understand why anyone would see "female" as a creepy word unless they had some underlying issue with females themselves or were too steeped in political correctness to write well because of some absurd fear of trigger words. It's very suspicious you are not willing to attach a "real" handle even to your assertions.

Re:Vocabulary exists for a reason

[dgatwood]

It [the word "females"] just sounds creepy. You can logically argue that it's not on slashdot but don't use it in real life or people will think you are weird.

It's not the word. It's the way you say it in that Ferengi voice.

Just saying.

Re:Vocabulary exists for a reason

[bluescrn]

The overuse of the word 'creepy' is arguably far worse than the arguably correct use of 'females'

because it matters?

[argStyopa]

Really?

The politically-correct bullshit has to stop - do people REALLY believe there's a concerted effort to keep women out of coding? It must be so, because that's the only situation in which this sort of thing would matter.

What you've just told CS instructors is to MAKE SURE every last woman in their course passes, and there's a financial reward for it.

Why does it matter what chromosomes your coder bears?

Re:because it matters?

[russotto]

The politically-correct bullshit has to stop - do people REALLY believe there's a concerted effort to keep women out of coding? It must be so, because that's the only situation in which this sort of thing would matter.

As far as I can tell, they do. Not in the sense of a conspiracy, but in the sense that they think male programmers are by and large misogynistic bastards who drive women out through our poor hygiene, sartorial failure, creepy stares, inappropriate jokes, and the like. This idea fails on any number of levels, chief of which IMO is that in professions where the men are far, far, worse (such as sales and advertising), there are more women.

Anyway, given that idea, the obvious "solution" is to simultaneously encourage more women (and fewer men) to enter the profession, while coming down hard on any sort of expression or action by men which might tend to alienate women. This, of course, fails on every possible level.

Re:because it matters?

[VortexCortex]

Why does it matter what chromosomes your coder bears?

Maybe the women are more likely to tolerate being underpaid. If training more coders is an effort to keep wages down, it might make sense to train a class of people who have historically worked for lower wages.

Except that your revisionist historical bullshit is wrong. Women who work the same jobs for the same time as men are paid more than men, this has been true since at least the 70's. Never married women make more money than never married men. What happens when folks get married? KIDS. So, The husband may work a bit harder while the wife takes maternity leave to have a baby. Women are more likely to spend time off work with their kids. Then some deluded feminists with an agenda come along and tally up the pay of all women and all men, ignoring the choices that women and men have made were different. Then they go on about some wage gap myth that never existed in the first place.

Furthermore, your argument makes no sense. If women naturally worked harder for less pay, then it would be foolish for any business to hire a majority men. Contrary to what you're implying: WOMEN ARE NOT DUMB. Get it through your fool head: You are wrong about the wages. STOP listening to the "women are always victims" bullshit. It's wrong. Read a history book or ANY unbiased sampling of wage data for fuck's sake: Running a home and raising a kid used to be a full time job before all our modern conveniences came into existence. Men and women are different. They have different bodies and behaviors thanks to millions of years of evolution as a sexually dimorphic race. They make different life choices at different rates. We give them equal opportunity and they express their differences in the choices they make.

Hypocrites

[korbulon]

It's easy for these assholes to talk, they were the extremely lucky ones in a winner-take-all industry which often metes out its rewards in absurd and haphazard ways.

You really want to make this world a fairer place: how about paying all your employees a decent wage, and maybe even take a cut from your ridiculously high comps? Then you might be providing an actual reason for more people to get into coding, including the ones with vaginas.

Re:Hypocrites

[nbauman]

Ha! You think Zuckerberg and Bill Gates just were lucky? Both had to fight tooth and nail against many competitors for several years and fend off many different challenges.

Your whole posts reeks of ignorance of history.

I read some of the history. Let's take Bill Gates. His father was a senior partner at the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis, which meant he made about $1 million a year.

So Bill Gates grew up as a multi-millionaire. If he got into horses, he could buy one. If he got into computers, he could buy one.

How many people have opportunities like that? 1%? 1/1,000?

It's true Bill Gates was smart, had to work hard and be aggressive, etc. But he also had the opportunities of being born into wealth.

You can't even insult well

[SuperKendall]

As you hate gay people, we can assume you hate women equally, therefore your ability to critique my own use of terms for femailty is null and void (and NULL and nil and 0 for that matter).

P.S. Computer Janitor is one of the lamest insults I have run across in many years. Even if I were an IT administrator and not a developer, being a "janitor" for a computer is more like being a janitor in a building where you have to fight ninjas and/or pirates every day, in addition to re-arranging the structure of the building itself which changes daily and must be warped back into working order.

So calling someone a "Computer Janitor" is the equivalent of calling them a "Warrior Architect". Not exactly the put-down you had hoped for when it implies they could hospitalize you for days with a good stare and a few typed commands.

You must have had some admin work you over pretty good, computer wise, to hate them so... Good for him.

Useless sexist assholes

[cfalcon]

Sexist assholes hard at work. Ignore the skilled and dedicated boys, we're trying to something something who the fuck knows.

Useless morons. I guess we can write off code.org as being anything but shitsacks.

Re:They want to move the mean

[gagol]

We also need more truck drivers, we should teach commercial diving in school as well! Seriously, school is about learning to live in society and with a bit of luck, seed a taste for knowledge that will drive the pupil to get knowledge bit itself, not create cheap labor to save training costs on corporations who prefers to NOT participate as much as possible in financing the education system.

Code.org: Inspire Students with Male Role Models

[theodp]

Kind of odd that just a few paragraphs after saying it will cap teachers' grants for classes with too many boys, Code.org instructs teachers to: 'Inspire your students: introduce computer science and make it exciting, creative and for everyone. Show your students the Code.org film, "What Most Schools Don't Teach": it features Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Black Eyed Peas founder will.i.am and NBA star Chris Bosh talking about the importance of programming."

Madoff, Gates, Ballmer, Zuckerberg, Schmidt

[globaljustin]

There is no "shortfall" of coders. There's just a glut of employers who want just-in-time employees cheap. Ones they can lay off at any time. Ones they don't have to send to training classes.

Yes. Agree 100%.

ALL OF US need to *call our congressman* and explain the above statement and demand they ignore FWD.US's policy suggestions.

Just look at the people...Gates and Ballmer? These guys are awful...they are horrible examples for businesspeople & have destructive notions of how society works. Zuckerberg demonstrates some competence but still his business philosophy is just as horrible and abusive as M$'s...then of course there's Eric fucking Schmidt...he who said on Colbert that only people who do bad things worry about privacy.

These people are the bad guys. Their ideas as always crafted strategically to maximize their personal profits...

FWD.US is for corporate profit by hiring cheap overseas labor...its not about hiring US workers

Re:The "man" behind the curtain

[notanalien_justgreen]

I don't really agree with the poster above you, but to state maternity/paternity leave is a 50/50 thing is just nonsense. Paternity leave (at least in the USA) is virtually nonexistent.

Re:Code.org: Inspire Students with Male Role Model

[Georules]

In my opinion so far, Code.org is constantly more concerned with 'creating excitement' and 'promotion' over a consistent message or actual content.

Re:Curious

[Bengie]

Similar for me. I was that below average student with no strengths. I did well in discussions and understood stuff, but I had a hard time doing arithmetic in my head or memorizing stuff. Around 8, I got to see a computer. It instantly clicked with me. I didn't have to do the math, I only had to understand it, the computer did all the work for me. After that, I started doing lots of reading on ASM, C, the kind of math video games have to work with, how CPUs work, how memory works, how HDs work, no chipsets work, how network work, what kind of problems there are like latency vs throughput.

A large portion of my time at work is designing and theorycrafting systems. Thinking about all of the choke-points and how to solve the problem in a good way. Always thinking about worst cases a given choke point could have and what requirements we could need to scale up the chokepoints if those occurred. etc etc

And my high school adviser said I shouldn't go to college because of my bad grades.

I agree, but...

[SuperKendall]

I totally agree with what you are saying. Transitioning from C to C++ and Java was not that hard. Transitioning from Java to Objective-C was not that hard. Many of the concepts are fundamental as you say...

And yet I think there are not that many people who would enjoy or tolerate the work it takes to learn how to express the concepts you know in new languages. Those that can though, I think are the most valuable ones because they are in general thinking at a more abstract level. So it means there is some stability, but only if you have a certain temperament.