
Announcing The Fog Creek Fellowship - joshyeager
http://blog.fogcreek.com/announcing-the-fog-creek-fellowship/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FogCreekBlog+%28Fog+Creek+Blog%29
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chollida1
> Additionally, all fellows will have 1:1 pair programming sessions with their
> mentors. Fog Creek currently has a 0.4% acceptance rate for full-time
> developers; The fellows will be working with the best in the industry.

I understand what fogcreek was tryiing to communicate here but I chuckled at
this as it flies in the face of something joel said about how everyone thinks
they are hiring the top 1%

>
> [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html)

On a more serious note....Congratulations to FogCreek, atleast they are trying
to do something here rather than just complaining about it on internet
forums:)

~~~
itsnotvalid
I was about to make a note of this but you found a much better example from
co-founder's (sort of defunt) blog.

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coldtea
Fellowship?

It's my personal opinion, and it might not be very popular, but I've never
seen a company making such ho-hum products being so pompous as Fog Creek.
(Well, StackOverflow is great. But it's not a Fog Creek business per se, and
it's probably more due to Jeff).

One might say 37 Signals, but 37 Signals has written New York Time best-
selling books, created the most celebrated web framework of the last decade,
and has a bunch of web products people love to use. Plus, I don't find them
much pompous anyway, just good at self-promotion, which is a different thing.

~~~
jlarocco
Yeah, we use Kiln and Fogbugz at work, and they're not the greatest.

Honestly, I don't care if it's a male or female who does it, I just want them
(especially Kiln) to work at an acceptable speed. Waiting 30 seconds for any
given page to load gets old fast.

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KRuchan
Great initiative. Reading Joel's blog was a fun and inspiring part of growing
up in the programming world. As a woman in CS, I look forward to see this
expanded to allow more of us to participate, not just NYC residents.

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gadders
Great firm, but I still can't ever imagine wanting to (or being compelled to)
eat lunch with the rest of my team every day.

~~~
zaksoup
The developers last company I worked at just naturally had lunch together
almost every day. It wasn't mandatory and often some folks would go and meet
friends or do their own thing for lunch, but overwhelmingly most of us ate
together. Honestly, I really loved it. It really helped us to get to know each
other outside of the work we were doing. It was also common for the non-
developers at the company to also join us for lunch, which I thought was
awesome. There was no sense of separation or exclusiveness.

Every day may seem like a bit much, but if you don't want to eat lunch with
your team 3, 4, or even 5 days in a row, maybe you're not working with the
right people...

~~~
MadMoogle
> There was no sense of separation or exclusiveness.

Even for the people who didn't eat with the group every day? I notice that
those people tend to get excluded over time. Not on purpose, necessarily. It's
human nature to see things in terms of "part of the tribe" and "not part of
the tribe".

> maybe you're not working with the right people..

This depends on a lot of factors. Even if you absolutely love everybody you
work with, you may not want to eat lunch with them every day. For example, you
work in an open office environment and see, hear and talk to them for 8-12
hours every day. Some would argue that, under those conditions, taking an hour
in the middle of the day to be by yourself or to meet with people you don't
see quite so often would be considered healthy.

On the other hand, if you all work in private offices 8-12 hours every day,
then taking an hour and socializing with your co-workers sounds fantastic.

~~~
zaksoup
It was a small office. When people went for lunch they just yelled and anybody
who wanted to join them did.

> Some would argue that, under those conditions, taking an hour in the middle
> of the day to be by yourself or to meet with people you don't see quite so
> often would be considered healthy.

That's certainly true, but I was more responding to the idea that somebody
would actively avoid it. I definitely took a lunch by myself with my kindle
not infrequently, but I certainly didn't go out of my way to avoid lunch with
my coworkers.

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stevoski
A female developer I once employed was from Singapore. She told me that in
Singapore there is no noticeable gender discrepancy in IT.

How accurate was she? I don't know. If she was correct, then it suggests that
the enormous over-representation in IT in the US and some other countries may
be due solely to cultural reasons.

~~~
moron4hire
That is literally the only thing that could explain the issue. We know that
women are just as capable at the job as men. There is no biological reason.
That only leaves culture.

~~~
coldtea
Perhaps, but it's not necessarily "bad culture".

E.g women might culturally just prefer other jobs in the US compared to
Singapore. If more women are into Biology or Math and less in IT or Physics in
some country, it doesn't mean the said country's culture has to change to
achieve 50-50 men/women in all professions.

The main issue is: what makes something a valid part of culture as opposed to
a bad part of culture we need to change? Culture doesn't just grow from
opression, but also from preferences, historical accidents, etc. Should we
abolish Cosmopolitan and Men's Health and have everyone read the same magazine
(say, Wired)?

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frogpelt

         In the past, we’ve focused on our intern pipeline 
         by recruiting heavily from schools with high 
         percentages of female students. We’ve hosted and 
         sponsored hackathons and events with a focus on women 
         in tech. We provide continuing education programs for 
         female employees who want to learn how to code. These 
         efforts have helped some, but it’s not enough. 
    
    

This topic has become VERY popular of late and is considered by most people to
be such a worthy cause. Can I be a voice of dissent?

If you've tried this hard to hire your fair share of female developers and you
still haven't been able to do it, is it possible that trying to force it to
happen may be the wrong approach? Perhaps it is the case that there just are
not females who want to be developers at Fog Creek.

The problem with equality, even equal opportunity, is that it is not realistic
(the world doesn't naturally provide equal opportunity) and it creates as much
discrimination as it purports to abolish.

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dominotw
Ugh.. Disgusting. What about other disparities? This is a company that is
famously elitist and now they seem to have jumped on this 'gender parity'
bandwagon for brownie points.

Lets give more opportunities to the most mollycoddled social class ( white
women) in the history of humanity.

~~~
Haul4ss
Is this the same mollycoddled social class in the history of humanity that
just earned the right to vote in the U.S. < 100 years ago?

~~~
dominotw
Yes access to great schools, well informed parents with good jobs, all
material comforts, red carpet welcome to STEM programs via scholarships. I
call that mollycoddled.

I tutor a mexican kid both of whose parents are undocumented immigrants they
don't seek out( out of fear) or even know about who to play the game, many of
his friends sell drugs.

Shouldn't lower socio/economic background trump being a woman when we come up
with programs like these?

~~~
jahewson
I'm appalled that you do so little to help starving children in Africa.
Instead you've put your efforts into helping the inhabitants of the richest
country in the world.

</sarcasm>

