There are studies that found that companies earn more when their boards and management are 50/50 men and women.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-08/more-women-means-more...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/why-companies-with-female-ma...

This might be a bias due to the fact that most companies are started by men (probably more inclined to take larger risks), and that companies need to reach a relatively successful state before the initial members of board and management have been circulated.

This is backwards thinking. Companies who have 50/50 male/female management are likely smarter companies, picking up smart women who are looked over for other roles and because they are smart enough to do that they likely do other smart things. It is the effect of a well run company not the cause of it. If your company is working working the other way they are dumb.

I completely agree that you can't better a body of people by forcing it to modify its constituents into a defined range of racial/gender ratios (and it may even be the case that you will worsen it on average). However, there is another goal: To help the individuals who would not have been hired. Of course, there's an argument to be made that any harm you might do to the body would then ultimately harm the individuals you helped to be placed in it, but I tend to believe that these opposing forces balance out on the net good side for the individuals.

There are studies for everything.

I love when people want to force something for “their own benefit”. I’m so glad you’re so concerned about my profits.

“Companies” covers a lot of territory. Market sizes, markets, local laws, etc.

The implication is that there is some innate quality in women that men lack and cannot acquire. Funny, the feminist movement spent decades fighting that myth.

But do we trust these studies? We shouldn't! I've read some of them before and they usually make basic errors of logic or statistics. For instance sometimes they take the gender makeup of boards across the world, and then look at how much (absolute) money the companies make. They end up including countries like Saudi Arabia in that, and in the inverse, countries with laws that force women onto boards. So they end up concluding "companies with women on the boards make more money" but all they're really measuring is "companies in richer countries make more money than poorer countries".

It's a sexist conclusion anyway. These studies are basically arguing women are better decision makers than men. Would people so passively accept studies concluding that companies do better when women are kept out of certain roles? I bet not.

I'm sick of tech being more scared of a man playing sound effects on CNBC than their thousands of paying customers.

I learned a lesson about opportunity costs while worked at an IT company. When I started, the company managed the IT for small companies, most being three to five people companies. We had full control of decisions so we kept them up-to-date with the latest best practices. I'm sure there was a bias of the types of companies who went with us as we charged more than competitors.

We started to gain larger clients. We thought that a 5,000 person company would be ahead of the 5 person company when it came to technology. Not so. Here is what we learned: there are political risks for changing technology. A CTO (these are not tech companies) would wait until people were complaining so extremely that people would have to feel that changes were good. It all arose from that bias most people have about change being bad unless it is ten times better.

This is so true. I've been in plenty of small business that are trying to do the best and their constraints are usually based on the ability of early hires.

Big companies have inertia to deal with for every change and once you get burned by something trivial that gets blamed for problems, you get very shy about improvements.

I'm in the process of building a system that had to make alot of compromises based on existing expectations. It's probably a year away from being where I want it to be because every change is so slow...

It's frustrating to defend these decisions every time someone comes along and notices how hard it is to use the system. I have to explain that every part of the system is broken out currently to find issues and fix them, the end goal is to stack everything together, but right now all the sausage making is on display and frankly it's appalling...

(edited for readability) end goal is turning a push button system that had to be carefully monitored for breakage (while it was running after hours) into a staged system that gets checked and verified during business hours, but still fires off after hours.

I don't see "retention" of talent in here but "recruiting" is. Is your team rapidly growing, or do you have high turnover? Recuriting is a costly activity compared to retention.

Really good observation. I think retention has become a side effect of happiness, culture and efficiency. We've had low turnover so it really didn't cross my mind because I'm not actively trying to convince people to stay. My takeaway here though is to not take people for granted. Although we have regular 1-1s, sometimes people don't talk about the little things that chip away at them and become big unless they're explicitly asked.

Jumping on here as this is a widespread issue in tech writing.

"The first time you use an initialism or acronym in your document, the words should be written out with the short form placed in parentheses immediately after."

There's a whole tag to handle it in HTML. Don't have to reserve it for only the first instance.

Huh neat, I didn't realize there was a HTML tag (<abbr>) till just now, thanks!

EDIT: Just spent the last 45 minutes adding it in on my sites in various spots, hopefully this helps the readers.

Thanks for this tip. Writing in this form definitely doesn't come naturally to me so it's great to be learning not just about the topic but also on how to better my communication.

It will also help with SEO

The next question is, will they. I know of a town in Indiana where a surprising number of people don't get medical help. Some of it is money, but a big part is cultural. Indianapolis scares them. I dare say, for too many Indianapolis is scarier than COVID-19.

No. You misunderstood the OPs premise.

Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.

Not if you avoid other people.

Now that you mention it, I use the second person of "you."

Now that you mention it, I use "you" for my future self a lot... "you've got to do the dishes when you get home"

Assuming an older dev is also a higher level, they are likely to be dealing with many non-technical problems like project management and politics. As such, their big problems to solve are less the tech and all the other issues around the tech.

Much of the money is pre-allocated by propositions