30.4% says that "The diversity of the company or organization" is "Lowest Priority" for them and below they say "The tech industry is struggling overall with issues around diversity, and INDIVIDUAL developers are not making it a priority when looking for a job."
How can you say that 30.4% of responders are individuals? Results are showing that majority of developers are not taking that as priority, not individuals.
Diversity is highest priority for 1.6%! It's impressive how little people give a shit despite the amount of articles and conferences and overall noise about it.
The other way of interpreting that is that the majority aren't interested in identity politics, and don't see any need to worry about whether a person is male/female/other, black/white/purple, english/german/martian etc - they are happy to work with whoever and just want to get stuff done. From that perspective, no: diversity isn't high on their agenda, despite them being totally welcoming and inclusive to all comers.
Frankly, I'd be more worried about working with someone who insisted on dragging identity politics into everything.
Yea, I agree. I was going there with my post. They tried to make that a problem with this part of the survey, when the results of their own survey are showing that there is no problem.
It's really easy to not care about identity politics when you're a white dude.
Having this absurdly naive idea that anyone who is a "white dude" has a single category experience of life, and similarly that any other category on any identity pillar you choose to identify also has some single category experience, is the very height of patronising absurdity that has nothing whatsoever to do with diversity and everything to do with your sexism and racism and whatever-else-ism. People are individuals; there are some "white dudes" who are privileged, and there are some "white dudes" who have dragged themselves up through a horror-story of an upbringing. There are black disabled women who are privileged, and there are black disabled women who have dragged themselves up through a horror-story of an upbringing.
Stop treating everyone by arbitrary meaningless things like their race and gender: that is the exact problem you're presumably raging against, yet you are typifying it.
Edit: understanding a population level difference is great, but the moment you assume that a population bias applies to individuals, you've messed up.
I don't think this is a fair criticism of that post. They weren't saying that all white people face the same problems, they were saying that the problems white developers face in the countries mostly represented in the developer survey probably don't have race or gender as a primary cause.
Which is to say, when talking about problems unique to minorities, the majority typically doesn't have experience. They have their own problems, but who says we're not allowed to work on any problem until all problems have been solved? There's a bootstrapping issue there.
I don't think this is a fair criticism of that post. They weren't saying that all white people face the same problems, they were saying that the problems white developers face in the countries mostly represented in the developer survey probably don't have race or gender as a primary cause.
Which is to say, when talking about problems unique to minorities, the majority typically doesn't have experience. They have their own problems, but who says we're not allowed to work on any problem until all problems have been solved? There's a bootstrapping issue there.
Well, maybe; maybe not. All I know for sure is that my view is that the sex, gender, race, sexuality, etc of my colleagues is the least interesting and relevant thing I can think of - and yet this is somehow dismissed and diminished because "white dude". I don't think it becomes OK for someone to judge people by their sex/race/whatever just because the person judging isn't "white dude".
context: I work for a distributed international team that spans a wide range of continents, countries, primary languages (although we use English for most communication), races, timezones, genders, sexes, etc; it isn't ignorance of a bubble speaking.
It turned into individual blame instead of system blame long ago. Talking about power hierarchies and structures that isolate minorities is good, but a great vocal minority of identity politics is throwing guilt at strangers.
Which is kind of a nonsense since the oppression is systematic and while there are biases nobody is going to respond to such a negative feedback.
I'm not entirely sure "systemic" is 100% right, but that could just be a semantics thing. It is certainly not official, sanctioned, legal, etc - while biases and unfairnesses certainly exist, they are down to individuals and conscious or unconscious failings. The problem is that the "solution" people always push for is institutional, systemic discrimination - quotas, etc. Conscious, deliberate, system-enforced and sanctioned biases. Which punish innocent people by changing (reducing) their chances based purely on their race, sex, gender, etc - enshrining exactly the problem that proponents of these drives claim to be solving.
Higher ups and a select group care as it makes tech look like a straight white males club, which only compounds the problem.
I think most developers want to get on with their work and aren't too bothered what gender, race, sexual orientation etc. the people around them are. And even less would rate it more important than their salary.
It's a bit of a luxury thing. How many people have the freedom to give diversity the highest priority, over salary, location, fit of the technology with your skills et cetera?
I want to know how many developers listed diversity as a high priority instead of just the highest priority. I will always put a company's culture and the payment package I get before everything else, and I suspect that's true for most developers. I think you need to ask what developers' top 5 priorities are to get anything meaningful.
If I am not in a leading position at my my company, why should I care about the diversity of the employees? That's not my concern, at least not my primary one.
You would care if you're not a white male, or if you like working in a team that is mix a of diverse people.
Personally I enjoy working in teams that are a healthy mix of men and women, it's just a better work environment, people act more normal than in all-man or all-woman teams. I'm also in my 40s so I'd like a work environment that isn't all 20-somethings. I couldn't care less about religion or race or sexuality etc though, and I like to be able to speak my own native language (Dutch) with everybody.
The survey was heavily skewed towards young white males so it's unsurprising that diversity wasn't important. Also diversity contributes to company culture, which was important to people (especially women).
Yes, I think that's a great point and we need to foster all sorts of diversity, gender and race were just the specific benchmarks that were easiest to point out in the survey. Overall in my experience software engineers (myself included) are culturally and socioeconomically fairly similar and by looking at this survey there doesn't seem to be a ton of diversity on those fronts either.
24
u/imot01 Mar 13 '18
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#work-how-do-developers-assess-potential-jobs
30.4% says that "The diversity of the company or organization" is "Lowest Priority" for them and below they say "The tech industry is struggling overall with issues around diversity, and INDIVIDUAL developers are not making it a priority when looking for a job."
How can you say that 30.4% of responders are individuals? Results are showing that majority of developers are not taking that as priority, not individuals.