Exactly. I think a lot of us nerds underestimate how vital of a skill that is, to be able to evaluate personal skills of a person. Someone could be a great programmer, but if he can't work well with others he'll be more of a detriment to the team rather than being helpful.
There's a lot of interesting research on "judging character". I particularly recall reading in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Kahneman) that subjective judgement was consistently worse than even relatively arbitrary objective judgements. I believe this study was conducted in army recruitment and so obviously may not be universal. Very thought-provoking notetheless.
EDIT: ... that's not to cast any aspersions on any particular people involved here, I'm just trying to make a general point that "intuition" or "judgment" may not actually be as good as we think they are.
The vibe I get is that it isn't character they're really trying to judge. They're really trying to calculate whether a person is palatable to downstream players. I think there's likely some market risk associated with various personalities and they need to address it somehow even if there's no quantitative approach.
A wild experiment would be to test their judgment system by planting a few charming serial killers in their "character judgment" sample pool. My hypothesis is that the charming serial killers would pass at a higher rate.
I really liked her take on her judging interactions, especially during the technical conversations. I think having an outside (even slightly outside) perspective is incredibly useful
What's the difference between a flamewar topic or a controversial topic? This seems like a conversation killing policy to me, at least assuming you're exercising it as intended.
What are the chances people heard it the first time? What are the chances somebody posting knows it's been posted before? To me this smacks of "yeah we've heard your stupid opinion before, it's been debunked, move on."
And by the way, the OP posted a flamewar topic. The concern here is with a flamewar opinion. Holding the opposite opinion on the same topic, I think, would get a pass. "I think it's great that they're getting up there, helping take on sexism in the industry." (And that's not to say I disagree with that opinion, I'm somewhere in the middle myself, for whatever it's worth. I'm just in favor of discourse.)
Carefull critisism of the basic idea of an event like this without trying to start a flame war is somthing that should be allowed though. We all know that things like these are issues that are part of a bigger issue (the lack of women in tech). But all issues surounding something like this should be addressed. Even if the critisism is pointed at attempts at solving/adressing these issues.
Like the trowaway account said/hopefully tried to say; segregation/discrimination is never the answer.
I would like to leave it at that before I aswell get accused of trying to start a flame war.
That was my initial reaction as well when I first heard about such an event. What's the point in segregating when there is already a segregation? But then I thought why even bother in which context an event with good intentions is held and as someone who favors utilitarianism I felt a little stupid that this wasn't my initial thought. From what I've heard these kind of events do have success, and the main motivation is, I guess, to create opportunities where women don't feel like a minority and where they can be role models for each other and people outside of tech. It's basically an attempt to break through the conjectured circular problem that women in tech are a minority because they are a minority.
More broadly, the point is creating safe space for learning and development. It's harder to develop new ways of being in an environment that reinforces the old ones.
>where they can be role models for each other and people outside of tech.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to put more women who reach accomplisments in tech in the spotlight? Because I rarely hear about the results etc of conferences like these.
Putting more women in the spotlight might be a good idea, but these events don't prevent doing so as well. If anything, they might help by increasing their visibility.
Segregation is not harmful in itself. It depends on how it's applied. It's easy to see that this doesn't map to Jim Crow, and a lot of disingenuous people try to make it map anyway to serve their own agenda.
Considering you had to make a throw-away account to express your rather mild opinion, and then was immediately down-voted for it, yeah, I definitely agree you have an unpopular opinion. More than that, the whole issue of gender in tech has become toxic because of the two opposing sides polarizing the issue.
In my place of work, most of the folks there identity themselves with things like "the front end js / photoshop guru who works out a lot", "that designer who boldly splashes black", "the one who listens to your problems and helps you deal with life", or even "the vegan crossfit dba", and literally no one identifies him or herself "female programmer", "male engineer", or what have you... Incidentally, despite the fact people flirt, joke, and laugh while working and being professional, we've never had a problem with sexism.
Considering you had to make a throw-away account to express your rather mild opinion, and then was immediately down-voted for it, yeah, I definitely agree you have an unpopular opinion.
Or maybe people that are interested in the conference want to talk about it without having the conversation hijacked by a rehash of the tired argument around the question of gendered events, which never goes anywhere on HN.
A down vote does not necessarily imply disagreement of the opinion expressed - it might just express disagreement on the choice of thread on which it should be made.
We have separate events for women in sports because they wouldn't be able to compete with men for obvious biological reasons. Holding separate events for entrepreneurship or engineering in the same way we do for sports sends the message that women can't compete with men in these fields either, which isn't true.
You would think so but if investors discriminate against female founders, It doesn't really matter if women are capable.
Also even as investor perceptions change, Women are still under represented in the startup circle and as with any other under represented demographic I don't see any problem with holding events that inspire/educate them to start a company.
> Holding separate events for entrepreneurship or engineering in the same way we do for sports sends the message that women can't compete with men in these fields either, which isn't true.
I wouldn't say that's necessarily true, it could be merely acknowledging (what I consider to be) the fact that women communicate differently enough from men that they'd like to have their own get togethers now and then. Is it "sexist"? Sure. Is that bad? I don't see how. Men in tech get to work closely with other men all the time, women don't. I don't see how women wanting the same thing just sometimes can't be considered perfectly reasonable.
We have separate events for women in chess tournaments as well. Could it possibly gasp be that womens brains are different to mens? Or is that utterly too horrifying to some to comprehend...
Presumably there are things they would like to talk about that are not interesting to others. For instance, maybe childbirth and pregnancy are something they care about. Honestly, maybe some things that are not as important to non-founders and men.
It's just a different forum. The same way we don't discuss mountain climbing on debian-dev. Anyway, that said, that's not why I considered down modding. It's because this argument plays out each time and it's annoying. It's another vi v. Emacs. So let's try to get something even slightly more novel out of this.
I differ on your take that that would be a vi vs emacs because it's not. Essentially, you're saying, it's a preference, choice, which this certainly is not. From a philosophical perspective, this kind of segregation is dangerous. I can see why it's attractive in the short-term. Indeed it may have short-term benefits, but it masks a problem, rather than fixes it. Essentially, a portion of society is saying, that part of society is not behaving well, so we'll form our own community and serve ourselves. I think that undermines the desire to improve the whole of society. The other part can keep on misbehaving, why should they bother recognizing their faults, the other is making it go away for them.
This kind of self organization underscores differences and magnifies them. So instead of saying entrepreneurs can raise capital this way, it's men can raise capital this way, or women can raise capital that way. So you get a bifurcation. And I don't know that that is a thing to be desired.
I think the oft quoted line from Parcifal, is apropos "die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug." That is to say, the wound can only be healed by the spear which smote it.
I must say I am disappointed that the Female Founders Conference did not address the challenges that women of color face in tech. Not a comment, nothing.
