Clojurians Log v2

Because the school topic was repeatedly mentioned, here’s a related anecdote @invertisment_clojuria: In Germany we have 16 different school systems (one for each state). Depending on each state’s political influence, different degrees of inclusivity offers. Some of the states are super exclusive/traditional. One can see various advantages and disadvantages in each case. But what’s for sure, is that none of these systems were destroyed yet, let alone from within. Some of Germany’s biggest successes can be tracked back to inclusivity. Recent example: Ugur Sahin, founder of BioNTech and inventor of the most effective Covid19 vaccine, currently/mainly researching on how to eradicate cancer, was recommended to not go to high school as a kid (and hence not to university later). Reason: He wasn’t believed to be smart because he was less vocal in school because he lacked skills in German as a Turkish immigrant. Luckily, a neighbor convinced the teachers to rethink their recommendation and to allow him into high school. As a side effect, a few decades later in 2021 the state/city where his company is being located could repay just by taxing BioNTech all the debt they ever made and Germany’s GDP was 1/8 higher in 2021 than it would have been without BioNTech.

Why do people talk about hiring ND and marginal group people when there are enough programmers around?Suppose we do a thought experiment where we enforce the converse, viz. "We only choose those with able bodies and minds.". What would the world look like? nb. the group of people who are the "we" and their definition of "able" will determine the outcome.

Is this a serious question, or venting frustrations?

It's actually a serious question.

Even though I thought about it based on your previous thread I specifically asked it in a separate thread so that you wouldn't need to answer. I didn't want to confront anybody.

Because it's ethical, and good business. Since you wrote "marginal groups", you might just as well ask why hire foreigners/people who don't speak the native language, women (since there are less women in IT), people over 30 (pick your age), or any other way to categorize people. Ethically all those also need jobs. From the business perspective I'm reading your question as, why put any extra effort into hiring, when you will get applicants anyway. If you want to do very elementary calculations, it would make sense to hire from groups that others are not hiring from, because then you get better candidates for smaller wages. To me that would strike as abusing the desperation of people having undeserved difficulties in finding a job, but I still find it good business, because more diverse teams can solve problems better (not very well researched, but I've read that programming teams with gender diversity already are more productive). And being thoughtful and considerate will help with retention. Even if there are always more applicants, turnover always has a heavy cost.

I have a friend who has some kind of bone problem (he says it hurts and so on and I think he can't work for the full day) and he wants to find a devops job. Do you think you'd want to get his contact?

No, we are not hiring now

I also don't forsee hiring a devops specialist in the future, clojure generalist perhaps. And our hiring needs are really a completely separate matter from discussion of how to do recruitment.

For me the weird thing is that companies that write about hiring marginal individuals try to strongly point out that they are somehow virtuous. For me this sounds weird as companies try to make money. If they would be seriously virtuous then they would create an NGO or something of that sort. Why create a regular company and be virtuous? For me this seems like an insincere signalling. Maybe your company is sincere and they actually don't work for money. But from what I understand I don't see why sugar-coating should be beneficial in other ways.

So you're saying hiring from marginalized groups would only happen out of generosity or sugar-coating?

I don't see how you see this, or the previous thread as any kind of signalling by the company. Nobody mentioned any company names, nor do we even have them in our profiles. And the methods discussed didn't have anything about advertisement or PR, it was how to actually handle interviews etc. I must admit I have difficulties believing that this is a good faith discussion, since I don't recall seeing any where word "virtue signalling" is brought up as a concept.

> Why do people talk about hiring [subgroup] when there are enough programmers around? Take this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, and it gets very very ugly. "Why hire someone with a kid — that little brat will compete for our employee's attention!" Worker protections exist for a reason.

And if you want to steer the discussion to "is everyone who claims to be ethical while making money dishonest", I don't think I have any interest in continuing. It is off topic not only to the thread, but likely to whole channel (if not whole slack).

The world is not as simple as it's being put here. Not every programmer is the same. Not every criteria for being marginalised is the same. So the assumption "when there are enough programmers around" is already faulty. Maybe the person who has bone disease is a much "better" programmer (whatever that means to the employer). And that might or might not be because of the disability. It might just be another facet of their character and skills. So why disregard? Doesn't make any sense.

In general, people have different needs and a workplace is more than a place to generate money (for the business and as an income for the employee). It's about a vision, to accommodate teams to create the best (not necessarily most) outcome possible.

That's why hiring for character makes so much sense. It's not just about hard skills and handycaps and whatever. It's about who you want as a person. Of course there are other jobs where the character doesn't matter much, however, in today's complex world, it matters more than ever.

"I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people"

seancorfield has said that the company that he works at had 700 applicants to one position of a junior JS developer. And that he's still sifting through the CVs and it's a very tedious task. I'm mentioning this to show that there are developers out there. Obviously some of those developers will have better and worse culture and some of them will be in a physical or psychological disadvantage. So if a company has such a hiring pool of candidates, why would they care to focus on disadvantaged people rather than productive people? Why go this extra step instead of looking for productive people? Productivity can mean teamwork and so on. I'm not talking about rockstar 1-man team people (even though you said you expect to hire devops+clojure generalists instead of team people that would work well in a team. This is offtopic but IMO these kinds of people that are such generalists and proper team people may be very hard to find.).

> why go this extra step instead of looking for productive people? because we don't want to live in a society where all we care about is people's absolute utility

> "there are enough programmers around?" Have you seen their code? Just sayin...

And separating people into marginalized and productive is a false dichotomy

Have you seen their code? Just sayin...700 junior JS guys. Their code will be bad. And they all want to learn. Some want it more though.

Measuring productivity is hella hard (go read https://neverworkintheory.org/ for example), so often it ends up being just a gut feeling of "people who work in the same way as I do" or "like most people do". Which or course leads to thinking that any kind of marginal group is not doing proper work.

"bad" -- let's not start moralizing, let's talk about utility. is their code useful? is it bang-for-buck cheaper? it very well might be. utility-wise, YOU might be expensive for your output and a couple juniors might be good enough. your engineering concern of "bad" isn't the same as the business concern of "does this work?"

which is another way of saying: everyone's fine with utility arguments until they find themselves on the other side of it

if you find yourself able-bodied and able-minded you should know that it's temporary

and you'll be on the worse side of utility arguments eventually

and so even if I can't convince you to care about other people maybe I can convince you that you want to live in a society where you'll be in a better spot once you lose some ability

And then saying that it needs extra work is also suspicious. What is extra? What I've seen is that companies pay multi thousand bonuses for employees who give a tip that leads to a hire, and use recruitment consultants to find suitable people. Me spending a couple of hours reading how to do things differently, not even how to do more, to recruit from a wider pool is hardly an extra cost. Even weeks would not be, considering that it will improve my hiring skills for decades.

I tried to reduce need to hire marginal people into utility and my direct questions were not accepted. But now you both say that it's about utility and not "because we don't want to live in a society where all we care about is people's absolute utility". I don't understand which answer I should take as your answer. I was thinking that "ok, maybe they are really idealistic, alright", but then Cora wrote that "which is another way of saying: everyone's fine with utility arguments until they find themselves on the other side of it" -- so wait, then we're still first talking about utility and only second in helping people. And then Hukka wrote about extra work which is also an argument about efficiency. I am confused.

I entertained your utility argument to demonstrate that you'll find yourself on the other side of it one day, in the hope that you'd see it's self-interest to want a just society.

I am trying to not push any narrative but then why do you bring up efficiency and utility all of a sudden?

Or let's ask in a different way -- are ND/marginal people more efficient?

frankly I think it's disgusting to reduce humans to utility, and all of history bears that out as true

I think it's more disgusting to talk about being nice while still reducing people to their utility. Even if it's indirect.

it's not "being nice". seeing difference as morally neutral flows from the desire for a just society and belief that everyone deserves dignity. no one pretends that difference isn't different, they just see difference as needing different supports in order to do what they need to do. the person in a wheelchair can travel several blocks safely by sidewalk but only if the sidewalks have wheelchair access. the abled person also can't travel those several blocks safely without support, and that support is sidewalks. everyone needs support, and different support is not bad

some things simply cannot (currently) be done by folks with certain disabilities, and no one pretends otherwise.

there's a huge difference, though, between needing different supports and being entirely unable. by refusing to offer different supports society is what is disabling these folks, not the differences in their bodies.

caring that folks that are different can succeed is not pity, it is an acknowledgment that everyone deserves dignity and support.

and your utility calculations change entirely if you consider supporting people with differences the cost of doing business and not the fault of the people you're hiring.

I've seriously heard people argue against hiring women of certain age groups because they're more likely to get pregnant, as though proliferation of our species is a liability in their pure utility world instead of just part of the cost of being human that we all bear together to one degree or another.

I literally got this answer in a physical job interview: "We don't want to train a new person -- we hire people who can immediately perform". Also Hukka had shown a similar vibe -- Clojure+DevOps, but not DevOps-only. I asked my DevOps guy what he thinks about this idea and he said that "DevOps is already a whole-company branch, I don't understand him". Ok. So Cora is fully supportive person. To some extent. Alright. This is a question of values for each person then. I think a "true" answer doesn't exist and it's a preference.

yes, it's a question of values, which is why I started commenting in this thread: https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C0KL616MN/p1714739599972049?thread_ts=1714732925.724799&channel=C0KL616MN&message_ts=1714739599.972049

why would they care to focus on disadvantaged people-> Not "focus on disadvantaged people", just not exclude them > Why go this extra step instead of looking for productive people? -> Excuse me, what? The implication here is quite disturbing.

The original message said that Hukka wanted to accomodate disadvantaged programmers. I tried to understand how much. And whether they are more important than regular ones. And if they're better.

Giving them the same chances doesn't mean they're more important. It literally means they're the same and not less important.

No it doesn't and I didn't say that they are better or not.

At least I hope I didn't say that 😄

You're making it sound like giving them the same chances is like giving them an advantage and disadvantaging others

This is the cartoon that always comes to my mind

To give everybody the same chance means not giving everybody the same box to see beyond the fence but to give everybody what they need to see beyond the fence.

@invertisment_clojuria I think it has objective utility

In information security there's all these principles of securing networks. You don't want to have a "single point of failure". Lot's of ideals. One is related to the idea of homogeneity and the vulnerabilities associated with homogeneity

Heterogeneity is a security measure against some threats in some systems

Indeed. And our society is such a system, too.

Every company is 😄

In most cases here, we want skill/experience/capability heterogeneity, but physical heterogeneity can be a proxy for that

The difference with security is that you already have the services. So you choose how far you want to secure them.

so, in a sense, diversity is a form of stereotyping, for a selfish cause

But they said it's not for a selfish cause And that confused me If they would've said it's for a selfish cause then I'd be saying "ok, it's understandable"

Right, but it also really is

it seems like you're looking for the dividing line between what is a reasonable vs unreasonable accommodation for difference and looking for a utilitarian understanding of that dividing line. it's a murky line because it's a moral quandary and society as a whole determines what is reasonable. so you're not going to find a formula here

There is this picture with Equality+Equity and ok... so who builds the steps? I think the argument is in the wrong place. Ok, we need equity. But if the candidates are suitable and there is one disadvantaged one that needs help, do we help? Because we could choose an already suitable candidate for the same or less resources.

Right, it's double edged sword

it is never the case that all things are equal

The squeaky wheel gets the oil sometimes

For me the argument seems to be more of this sort (let's not talk about genders in the picture because it's not the point):

I think the point @invertisment_clojuria is trying to make here is that there's a lot of talk about support for ND folks, but then they can spend years looking for a Clojure job and still have problems 😕

And that can be frustrating

I was not pointing into a technology. If a person is disadvantaged then they might require infinite help.

> so who builds the steps? It's not like steps are an investment always. Often it's the mental steps and empathy.

It doesn't cost you much - or often anything - to be nice person.

> If a person is disadvantaged then they might require infinite help. Not sure what you want to tell us

> If a person is disadvantaged then they might require infinite help. two things: 1. this is for everyone in the thread: we can say disabled, disabled is not a shameful thing to be and so we don't need to sugar-coat it. 2. requiring infinite help goes beyond reasonable accommodation, which is what my previous comment was about, that there's some level of reasonable accommodation and that's a moral judgement by society

Not sure what you want to tell usLet's say a person can do somewhat complex differential equations in his head but is a meth addict.

and now?

Do we hire that person? Maybe we could accept he's an addict and roll with it.

If he's outperforming the other candidates and we don't have a drug policy for a reasonable reason, why should we have implicit barriers to exclude the person? Rather lift all barriers.

Some of the changes needed are as simple as, "Have fewer people in the interview at once", and, "Don't require video be turned on for meetings". Those benefit everyone and cost nothing. Other accommodations might take more, but often not as much as some think. And the benefits of a heterogenous workforce can be a multiplier effect.

one part of reasonable accommodation is that you don't need to accommodate direct threats. if you're trying to demonstrate that someone could be a direct threat and in an "infinite help" system we need to accommodate that, I'm here to tell you that "infinite help" is not even the goal and direct threats aren't something we should accommodate. now I could also argue about whether addiction makes you a direct threat or not but I won't because I don't think that's what you're getting at

What is there left to discuss? It feels so obvious 😄

@invertisment_clojuria brings up an interesting point about signaling. Everyone wants to have their diversity outreach efforts, but the smaller a talent pool is, the less that pool can actually live up to those outreach goals. That can result in frustrations on all sides. I don't see an easy solution to that problem though

Well, @invertisment_clojuria you were saying "when there are enough programmers around" but I think it's actually the reverse, where it's harder for Clojure than other communities to actually do the thing

We've also been in a down hiring round for some parts of the market for a while now

> but I think it's actually the reverse, where it's harder for Clojure than other communities to actually do the thing What do you want to say? There not enough Clojure devs or there are not enough diverse Clojure devs?

Not enough Clojure jobs to compete with some other communities in their diversity efforts, I presume

I guess the larger the community, the easier that is

I'm having a really hard time believing this is a good-willed discussion, when I read this: > disadvantaged people rather than productive people I... really don't know what to say. First, because this dichotomy doesn't exist - you can be productive and disadvantaged; heck, even the concept of productive person is wrong - I was insanely productive under a company that I did react-native, a stack that I never worked before, and I was horribly unproductive when I was working in a recent company that had a completely familiar stack for me. But again - the division bothers me. It seems that this discussion started under the "disadvantaged / marginal group people are unproductive" and I simply can't imagine in which planet this idea is acceptable, or even correct.

I assumed he meant disabled people that need different supports or accommodations in order to be productive on the job. those people do exist and I'm one of them.

maybe reading it charitably was a mistake, though, I have no idea. I'm bowing out of this conversation because no one's getting convinced of anything and enough has been said that anyone on the fence could be edified.

If you don't have any more hair left you're not disadvantaged. If you don't have a leg you are.

Most part of programming problems and human problems tends to relate to communication, more diversity implies in describing / solving things in different ways, Independent how much you studied, there are a lot of people that didn’t had opportunities to get training but adapt and learn much more fast than people that “were well trained”

And no, I don't think race is a disadvantage. I've worked with Indian and Chinese people and I never undermined them. Even if sometimes they were not paying attention or were doing not-so-smart things.

I think there are a lot of people that “wasn’t trained well enough” that can have better gotchas for solving a lot of different problems concerning organization / communication or even algorithms gotchas that you can’t imagine

In a good perspective, this seems a difficult way to figure out this “type of thinking” if you haven’t lived through very different ambients / very different cultures than yours

Or had a chance to help ND and people with disabilities

My mom is a teacher and she told that the government will start moving "disadvantaged" people with various disorders into the same classes as the "regular" children. The problem is that sometimes it will result in reduced attention from everybody else because of a shouting person who can't control himself. I think this is not a smart way of doing things.

This is not problem of the children or your mom, seems like more a problem on how the politics were implemented and how the dialogue was established

Also, people with “various disorders” is something vague and kinda subjective, mostly it’s important to live and learn different ways on stablishing dialogues

I think indeed that even we have around a lot of people on software engineering we’re also rounding the wheel a lot of times again and again because we have kinda poor dialogue haha

It’s good to have new peeps here and there :D

This is not problem of the children or your mom, seems like more a problem on how the politics were implemented and how the dialogue was establishedI think this is EU-wide thing. Currently I'm imagining some kind of war-driven lobbyism happening that intends to destroy whole countries from within. Long-term. But hey, it's me and my imagination -- I can't be right.

At this point, there have been plenty of studies that show that teams with a diversity of thought tend to be more productive because they have a wider variety of ways of thinking about problems and coming up with novel solutions. People with different lived experiences -- for whatever reason: race, gender, disability, etc -- will tend to have different ways of thinking about things. So, for me as a hiring manager, I want a team that has that diversity of thought, which means I benefit from hiring people with different lived experiences. It's as simple as that. That means making more effort throughout the hiring process to a) attract more diverse applicants in the first place (perhaps by specifically posting your job in spaces that support underrepresented groups), b) making sure the CV/resume review process is as fair as possible, and c) trying to make the actual interviews as accommodating as possible. That's all possible, but a company has to do extra work to make all of that happen. And (some) companies are willing to do that extra work in order to hire more diverse employees and benefit from heterogeneous thinking. On the other hand, some companies just want to hire fungible cogs in their machine and don't care much about diversity: they'll just hire more cheaper homogeneous cogs.

I agree wholeheartedly with many of the responses in this thread. I also want to mention a more brass-tacks angle on the same question: discrimination against disabled people is illegal in many jurisdictions. In the US at least, if a manager wrote things like “why can’t we just hire someone productive instead” in an email, that email would be used as compelling evidence against that employer in a lawsuit.

I'm also leaving this conversation. Just want to say that: > intends to destroy whole countries from within made me sure this isn't in good faith. You're free to have your own opinions, of course; let me just remind you that lots of things in the past, and in the present, are used with the argument of "it's going to destroy the country", and I believe I don't need to explain which they were; in fact, my life right now contains at least four or more things that were going to "destroy the country" in the past...

Since Martynas said "I'm imagining..." I think it's a combination of being overly dramatic and a bit paranoid 🙂 But, yeah, it does kind of make it hard to know whether it's meant to be a serious discussion or trolling at times... I get a lot of that from friends of mine who live in China so I think it's understandable if you live or grew up in a country where your government is sketchy in terms of how it treats its citizens. Can't remember which country you're from @invertisment_clojuria but I think you've expressed that sentiment about your government?

slams a few hundred years of moral philosophy down on the table: "anyone up for a game of The Veil of Ignorance?"

Discussion The discussion was hard to me too because the majority thinks and agrees among themselves. And it's hard to point into problems when everyone else doesn't agree on terms. I'm not saying I won or anything. My concern is that when a company says they are virtuous it's a trap -- when MS says they are carbon negative then I don't believe even for a second (and I don't believe that being carbon negative is anything else than a PR campaign (can every housewife be carbon-negative? Can every microbe be carbon negative? Where do we stop? It's not productive)). So I don't believe the job ads that say they want diversity and inclusion -- maybe they do but I don't think it's the primary goal. I think that companies and especially large corporations value ROI more than inclusion. And if job ads with "inclusion" increase ROI then this is what they do. I think it's always ROI first and everything else second (this is why I asked about company becoming NGO instead of for-profit). Countries In the past I've expressed problems not about my country but russia. It's a problem that this student thing is happening but other than that I didn't really talk about things in my country. And my country is Lithuania -- the one who started talking about the war dangers first (russia-ukraine). And this is because russia would surely want to conquest our country again after Ukraine. If Ukraine falls then we're next. We know because we were occupied before. So yes, we always live in this mindset. And no, the war-related idea wasn't random one -- russia always tries to destabilize our country. And sometimes it even works a little like with the Egyptian immigrants that try to come from belarus or with corrupt politicians that try to push russian agenda. The politician thing is real, they decide on who gets financing. I've talked to a lot of people outside of my country and for example some French people are extremely myopic and don't see further than their nose -- and at the same time they're nationalists for their own country (or maybe they're Moroccans (who live in France) who don't care about war until Algeria doesn't attack them). I guess I added some diversity to this forum.

> I guess I added some diversity to this forum. And made everybody else uncomfortable and unhappy in the process.

I think it's just hard to figure out intent from our plain text chat sometimes, especially where there are different cultural experiences informing both the questions asked, and the answers given... and it also informs our interpretation of other people's responses to our questions. We all have our internal biases and default positions...

I certainly was not arguing that companies or governments, both amoral entities, care about anything besides money and power, respectively. they're definitionally not virtuous, but can be made to act like they are.

Treating people the way you’d want to be treated makes a workplace a better place. Life is too short to care overly much about utility and such.

But I acknowledge that I say this as someone who has enjoyed safety & stability for my entire life, and it’s probably more difficult to be generous & equitable when everyone around is in peril of war

FWIW, and TL;DR, but sharing a recent paper. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nscd4 Workforce diversity is increasing across the globe, while organizations strive for equity and inclusion. Therefore, research has investigated how team diversity relates to performance. Despite clear arguments why diversity should enhance (some types of) performance, and promising findings in individual studies, meta-analyses have shown weak main effects. However, many meta-analyses have failed to distinguish situations where diversity should have a positive impact from those where its impact is more likely to be negative, so that boundary conditions remain unclear. Here, we provide a new comprehensive, meta-analytic summary of the growing literature that considers the state of the evidence across disciplines, countries, and languages. We conducted a reproducible registered report meta-analysis on the relationship between diversity and team performance (615 reports, 2,638 effect sizes). We found that the relationships between demographic, job-related and cognitive diversity, and team performance are significant and positive, but insubstantial (|r| < .1). Even considering a wide range of moderators, we found few instances when effects were substantial – though correlations were more positive when tasks were higher in complexity or required creativity and innovation, and when teams were working in contexts lower in collectivism and power distance. Contrary to expectations, the link between diversity and performance was not substantially influenced by teams’ longevity or interdependence. Further research will need to assess how contextual factors such as psychological safety and team’s virtuality affect the diversity-performance link. The main results appear to be robust to publication bias. We discuss implications of these results for researchers and practitioners, and provide a web app through which readers can further explore and aggregate subsets of the data: https://2ly.link/1xekY.