Java & Diversity In Tech | Trisha Gee In The Engineering Room Ep. 2

[@francis_n]

"I'm a Reduced Instruction Set programmer". For some reason I loved that line

[@RickGladwin]

I did microcontroller programming back in the early 2000’s and you could memorize the entire command set because it was only around 100 commands. It made for a lean kind of proficiency.

[@vendolis]

I want a shirt with that sentence on it :-)

[@bleki_one]

I would say Trish just described my story when talking about GDC and LJC. My first contact with LJC was at meet a mentor event when still on uni. I call joining LJC one of the most important decisions in my career. You have touched so many things I can relate and agree with...

[@petergray453]

I was listening very carefully to her ideas at 56:30 onwards and at some point I caught myself asking: is her pursuit a good programming job really? She seems concentrated on biological and geographical diversity, language policing ("guys"). What struck me though was that part at 1:06:00 when you're talking about that unfriendly comment treating about your physical appearance and age. You said that "even if those are true, what kind of basis is that to make a choice about software". So true! Trisha concurred, while perhaps forgetting that quite a few times she's had mentioned you're a white male as a characteristic that is rather not desired according to her own ideas.

[@stochasmvid]

Ignore the trolls. There are people who build themselves up by tearing others down. Spend your time and energy on the ones who are interested in building everyone up.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks for the encouragement.

[@fungiug]

An awesome discussion, thank you both. It's important to have the discussions about inclusion and diversity, and the value of those. I read too many comments about being "nice" or "doing lip service" where people fail to see the substantial benefits to all of us (including we old, grumpy, white guys) in creating an industry that promotes these. I particularly enjoyed the comment about the difference between mentoring and sponsorship.

[@jonathanaspeling9535]

Use groups are amazing - I concur! Great content thank you!

[@RalphAlberg]

Thank you for this excellent content Mr Farley - you bring humanity and grace to our profession

[@ikirachen]

That is the spirit. This becomes my favorite youtube channel.

[@hcubill]

Love Trisha and all her content! ❤

[@sergejsvisockis]

Great talk! I love it! Trisha is perfect and precise as usual :)

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thanks so much!

[@ArchiDimon]

She seems to be an excellent software engineer, love that part of the dialogue. However, the idea of pushing for "diversity" for the sake of diversity is similar to "automation" for the sake of automation - just by adding "the thing" won't necessarily help you get the job done. Sadly, this point is missing in the modern "meta".

[@aleksandrvasko8976]

Really great talk. Appreciate this type of content.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

More to come!

[@MarkDurbin]

Thoroughly enjoyable, thank you both.

[@pansrn]

This is a fantastic addition to the usual content. Looking forward to more. Happy holidays and best wishes for the new year.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thank you! Happy Holidays to you too!

[@sasaa4908]

Thank you for this video and sharing insights !!

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@sergeixtc]

Nice talk, thanks for sharing.

[@RudhinMenon]

Thanks for the comprehensive talk

[@instinct94]

I had great experiences with hiring women, who were eager to work on software projects and absolutely horrible ones with hiring software developers, just because they're women. Its supposed to be „fair“ that way. It is not fair. The people, it hurt the most, were the women, who thought they were hired, because they were seen as the best choice. Then had to face the harsh reality, that they can't keep up. It never ended well. If you really care for others, then don't let them experience what its like to be misplaced in their occupation. Choosing the most competent to the best of your abilities to carefully judge that, is the best for all of us.

[@christophercotton7149]

Great episode! Thank y'all 👍

[@thr4wn]

I love these videos!! I watch every single one

[@suiko619]

I first saw Trisha at a conference in New York, and she's been my hero ever since. I loved her video course on Java 9 and I check the the Java annotated monthly every month. Representation and visibility do make a difference. Btw if there had to be a woman who speaks for all female developers, I would vote for her! 💕

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I hope there doesn't have to be one, but she'd be good at it there was. 😉

[@JohnnyNilsson83]

Wonderful conversation to listen to! Thanks @Dave and @Trisha! Ive been a java developer for almost 10 years, working in the same company all years. This talk kind of got me to think of what should my next step be. No answer, but at least a question! I am lucky to work in a great company and in a team with mostly women. But it also shields me from the reality on the market.

[@lcirocco]

Good talk! And to think, developers knit in their spare time, do they ever take time off from running programs? Personally I've recently discovered crochet, a truly single threaded, atomic instruction execution language. But hey; we're all different, otherwise there'd be nothing for me to talk about ..

[@bernardamofah4524]

Ho great conversation. Can i ask a question to you both: for some one who has been in the industry for a few years but wants to get better at modelling (building objects to a solution), what resources can one use to get better at that in conjunction of adding functional programming and TDD

[@aldosilva6]

Very nice interview. If you've got a woman applying for a job and an exactly same qualified man applying for the job, who would you give the job to? Both of them 👏👏👏.

[@TheRealCasadaro]

Good talk with lots of good advice that’s based on reason, logic, and first principles but, near the middle to end shifts from competency to perception or perceived perceptions based on sex and race. INF you have the skills and seem like a pleasant person to work with you will go far; if you obtain the mentality that you get less because of sex and race the Instead of improving your skills, you expend energy of identifying sexism and racism; the people that really want to get stuff done don’t care about sex and race, and if you bring this to them they are not going to want to deal with you, thus producing the outcomes we don’t desire; the later part of this broadcast runs reasonably and dangerously close to tainting the minds of woman and minorities to to the point that they will believe that that their shortcomings in skills don’t exist, they are simply being rejected do to race and sex. Nonsense, in a free market economy the ability to produce desired outcomes Trump sex and race.

[@juanpabloamorochod.752]

excelent! I love it!

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Thank you!

[@brownhorsesoftware3605]

I started programming in 1977 in assembler on IBM 360/MVS. When I left 3 years later they replaced me with 4 people. I was hired because I got a very high score on the IBM programmer's aptitude test. They taught me assembler in 3 months. It was the last place I worked where there was more than one other woman developer until 2011 when the Norwegian feature phone platform I did the Java integration for was acquired by Nokia. I really enjoyed the interview. I was rather surprised to read the comments, however, which are remarkably unenlightened. The question at hand is how does one attract women to the field, not whether women can do software. As one of those few women who does, I recommend simply pointing out that even though you will probably be paid a good deal less than your white male counterparts, it will still be enough money to pay your horse's board.

[@ContinuousDelivery]

Nice reply! I confess that I was disappointed, if not surprised at some of the comments to this video (can you be both disappointed and not surprised? 🤔) I see no difference in the aptitude of men or women for developing SW, there were certainly a lot more women in senior roles when I started out, because there were more women in computing earlier on. I think this is a serious problem that half of the population of the planet are so massively under-represented, clearly not everyone that comments on KZbin videos agrees with me. This is one of those things though where I just think they are wrong, hopefully misguided rather than malicious, but still wrong.

[@petergray453]

The question would be 'why do have to focus on attracting people of this or that gender?'

[@ContinuousDelivery]

@@petergray453 The difficulty is that if your org is already gender (or anything else) biased then it won't get "open to anyone" right. I won't think of things that will dissuade, or attract, people who are very different to me, so organisationally, our focus when looking for people tends to narrow rather than widen, so our perspective narrows too. I am pretty sure that the people that developed AI systems that didn't recognise black faces as people weren't doing this intentionally, they just didn't notice that all their training data was white people, so missed a really important, really obvious thing (obvious in hindsight, or maybe if you are black).

[@cihangirbozdogan4549]

She says "woman meet 90% of the criteria of a job role before they apply for that job, but man only 50%"...!! This is very bad and untrue!... After my 14 years in the industry i see that: woman are amazing in communication and they become great communicators in the team. They are very responsive and kind. Great team members. this helps them to become an important part of the team. (as well as they are good at coding!)

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I think that you may be right, in that the oft quoted stat, doesn't seem to be backed up by any research that I can find. It seems it originated in a study at HP, but was a subjective statement rather than based on real data. There's an interesting article on the topic here: hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified

[@dgkimpton]

The continuous refactoring approach is something I do all the time - I'd almost go as far as to say it's essential - but it definitely shows up a limitation of git. Diffs get large quickly and make it very hard to be sure all the changes have been reviewed. It would be so awesome if version control could just say that XXX was renamed to YYY - a quick and simple concept to review and agree with. Maybe as a stop-gap measure, the editors (like InteliJ) could just keep a log of the renames (etc) in the project root? Then reviewers could quickly go over that log to see what changed. Dunno, but this is something of a pain point and I've never actually seen it being discussed before.

[@arwahsapi]

You guys are inspiring!

[@alessandrofardin9517]

Thank you Trisha, Thank you Dave for this fantastic speach. Lots of arguments to think about, technical and non technical, both importants. I think worlds needs woman and needs man in the same measure. And SW make no differences. I think I have lots of things to learn from other people, and I don't mind if these people are woman or man, black or white. I think the world Is changing in the right direction from this side. For the technical aspect.. in these days I have done a huge refactoring of One of my old piece of code using my IDE refactoring tool, rename, extract function.. I renamed functions in a way that code Is Is now more readable and so I could remove the comments. It has been nice in to listen you talking about It, but don't blame me.. I'using "the other IDE" Ecilpse 😃😃.

[@AloeusCapitalManagem]

I wish you'd get into some of the more important concepts like "tabs over spaces".

[@petergray453]

They are hurting women by convincing them that they all can and ABSOLUTELY should go into IT. Their trick is to show them the theoretical part of programming in a very concise and fun way and say: see? it's so easy, you can do it, girl! The truth is that the theory is very easy and half of the population can learn it. The hardest part is actually doing this job day by day for hours. That's something they are not telling women. And this makes it so difficult for that tiny minority of great female-programmers who then have to struggle with those who had an easy start via the 'tick exercise' hire.

[@maelstevens]

Dude, women invented computing, and the first devs were all women. Maybe it is women who have a thing or two to teach you.

[@Oswee]

"Woman in tech"... I personally don't think there are any dark forces preventing them to fill those roles. It's just an natural flow of biology. If you will give computers for 10 boys and 10 girls, then I am pretty sure most of the girls will get bored pretty quickly and only few will found it exciting to stare at screen all day long. (super simplified example). It's just up to them to take those roles by investing into particular skill set.

[@robwatson826]

In my team, we have 1 team member that is not "white british male". We're on a recruitment drive and are only having the stereotypical types applying. One of the key features of a great team, in my opinion, is diversity but we just don't have any coming through the recruitment process. What's the trick to attracting team members with different ideas to a company?

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I think that this is a big problem, it is structural. The problem with some groups being under-represented is that they are in in short supply. I spoke at a conference a few years ago that was widely criticised for having poor representation of women, but I know that they had tried, and failed, to encourage women to speak. I guess it helps to be conscious of it as a problem, and to do your best to appeal to people who are not "white British males" as well as those that are and to at least try an make selections based on capability rather than gender, race or whatever. I know of several orgs that, for example, remove names from CVs, so that during the early part of the selection process, at least, there is no bias based on sex or ethnicity. I know of at least on technical conference that did the same for talk submissions.

[@dgkimpton]

Have you tried re-working your job advert to appeal to other categories? Maybe ask a (*insert desired characteristic here*) person to rewrite your advert in a way that would appeal to them? Like if you want women to apply, get a woman to write the advert. I feel that we naturally write adverts that reflect what would make us want to apply - so of course, we get applicants just like us. It's hard (almost impossible?) to know as a white male what would appeal to non-white non-males... that's exactly why we need diversity in the first place. I'm certain there will be (*insert desired characteristic here*) people who you could hire for a reasonable fee to retarget your application process. You could probably also learn a thing or two about what makes your workplace desirable/undesirable to (*insert desired characteristic here*) people at the same time and the costs aren't going to be much compared to hiring the wrong people for the job.

[@robwatson826]

@@dgkimpton Very good points there, I’ll see if I can give that a go this coming year!

[@langera14]

Aww..... Nostalgia. :)

[@ContinuousDelivery]

😁😎How you doin?

[@langera14]

@@ContinuousDelivery Doing well, thanks. Glad to see this channel gets traction. I recommend your videos to all developers I interact with. I especially like to share the "How to estimate" video whenever anyone tries to estimate time and talk about "educated guesses"... 😎

[@ozguryilmaz6564]

There is no dark force for inequality. Simple fact is that there are more men which are a-social and geek than women. There are a few women which are a-social and geek .

[@ContinuousDelivery]

…and who says that being asocial and a geek makes you good at software, that’s just a stereotype.

[@ozguryilmaz6564]

I think that software development is mostly social activity. But i also think that a lot of time asociality and geekness is needed to learn and being good at a software.

[@ozguryilmaz6564]

thanks for your good works.

[@ikirachen]

Trisha Java community is indeed more mature. Aaaand i am .NET dev :)

[@AleksandarIvanov69]

As long as we fundamentally view people and ourselves as a part of groups and not free, independent individuals, there is no way forward for us as a species... Especially in an age of rapid change and constant innovation, there is no place for such primitive notions. People, after thousands of years of mostly childish barbarism need to finally grow up, if they want to survive.

[@TheRealCasadaro]

Thank you for saying this.

[@__napcakes__1911]

How old are you?

[@ByToothandClaw]

This channel has some great stuff and this interview is part of that, but "pick people because you like to work with them" is why we end up with a lot of homogenous teams. People tend to like people like themselves, who think in similar ways and who won't challenge their ideas. It was a throw away comment at the end of this interview but that subconscious bias is fundamental to the issues we have. I also didn't like the "men tend to be like this" and "women tend to be like this" that was littered through it. Once you start saying " tends to be like this" as a way of changing how you approach things then you start to exclude superficially sub-group member who aren't like the "tendency". E.g. there are some very meek and mild men who really underachieve because they don't apply to jobs above them. Set a baseline and then focus on picking different backgrounds and different experiences and the ability for someone to bring that to a team in a co-operative manner (recognising that maybe some neurodiversity won't be as capable in being as socially adept and co-operative as others). So I'd like to hear more "pick someone because they broaden the team not replicate it"

[@ContinuousDelivery]

I suppose it depends on the people. I like to work with people who don't think like me, at least in some ways. I would agree with you very strongly on "pick people who broaden the team". I am not sure if Trish or I explicitly stated this, but I know that what I mean is "choose people you'd like to work with (because they add to the capability of the team)" and I am pretty sure that is what Trish meant too.

[@ByToothandClaw]

:-) adding the bit in () makes all the difference! In my experience, managers selecting "people I like working with" makes teams very homogenous! Personally I find that favorite interview question "how do you deal with difficult people?" interesting. Even more interesting is when you are being briefed on the team, the "difficult ones" are those who are better described as the "different ones". They are the ones who help the team out of a rut if they are given support. (I usually join a team because it is in trouble so may have a heavy bias!)

[@jack-d2e6i]

Good for you! Philosophically there is no positive obligation to ally with anyone, or group. You employ who you like, you are friends with who you like, and you avoid those you don't like. It's called "voluntary association". Anything else is just the modern day koolaid - and god help you if that translates into government policy. If "diversity of perspectives" is so super important, then why are certain political opinions considered gouche, and all we seem care about is skin color / genitalia. Do genetics precede ideas (that's bordering on racism, and seems to be the main focus of the diversity hiring)? If not, and ideas precede genetics then, talk about republican representation and philosophical perspectives across tech, not skin color and gender.

[@TheRealCasadaro]

Thank you for saying this.

[@KA-wf6rg]

Yeah I'm sorry we just need to stop with the "There's not enough X demographic in Y profession." What about the underrepresentation of women in plumbing, mechanic, or electrician professions? I never hear people talking about that. It only becomes a discussion when it relates to high paying or high profile professions. Why is that? If we're truly concerned about "diversity", why not target all professions? Are software engineers somehow more noble than plumbers? Perhaps it's more about the perception of wealth and power. But why is it exactly that you find more men in certain occupations? Is it truly a "problem" that needs to be resolved, or will men and women naturally gravitate, to a large degree but not always, to certain professions because guess what, they are different and truly unique by design. There's nothing wrong with that. Also, why aren't there more male than female nurses? When I was in school 80-90% of the demographic in the Journalism field were women. Is that a problem too? What about the lack of diversity in the home cleaning or service industry? I venture to say there are likely more hostesses at restaurants than "hosts". Let's just stop. It's not a problem and it's creating further division and confusion by creating the illusion that there's something wrong with society that needs be fixed by dismantling certain institutions and norms that have existed since the dawn of creation.

[@ikirachen]

Dave we can be friends :)

[@MrAbrazildo]

She looks better now, with this grey hair, than she did before. 47:14, creating a daily-bases modifiable array-list is an under-appreciated feature in Java?! What do they use instead? 48:10, but anyone could previously write a tiny f(), in order to never write those if/elses again, right?

[@Hofer2304]

She spoke about unmodifiable array-lists. Whenever possible, use library functions. Everybody can read the documentation of this function, but your function can have a misleading, or even lying, name, the reader has to check the parameter list of your function, your algorithm could have a subtle error.

[@dgkimpton]

Dude... "She looks better now, with this grey hair, than she did before." is exactly the sort of thing you can best keep to yourself. Hair color has got *nothing* to do with technical ability, quality of content, or anything this video was about.

[@MrAbrazildo]

@@dgkimpton I just said that she has a nice aging, better than most people. For the content, I left a thumbs up and asked those 2 questions.

[@petergray453]

@@dgkimpton then why so much of the interview is about people's looks like gender and race? Make up your mind, mister white knight.

[@willi1978]

I don't like diversity because of what people talking about it mean. They usually want to raise the amount of people that do a specific job but never care to ask themselves why that group prefer to do other jobs. Artificially raising the percentage of that one group only leads to discrimination against all other groups. Group thinking leads nowhere but conflict. Men vs Women, White against Black. Older values of empathy, respect and knowledge sharing helps a team to perform a lot better.

[@chauchau0825]

The first 48 minutes are fantastic until the conversation goes woke

[@tetraquark2402]

Girrrrrrl!