There has been a lot of recent noise regarding the demographic makeup of typical software developers and people working in CS. There is a lot of “pushback” against it, which is a bit unusual. There is really no denying it. Look at almost any CS-related software team and you will find they are almost completely made up of nerdy, young white males. They think they got there through hard work and that the demographic dominates is because they are simply the best, but that is simply not true- it’s a self-perpetuating monoculture. Hell I’m a nerdy white male (Not so young now, mind…), I like programming and do it in my spare time but somehow that "feature" has become this almost implicit requirement. You need to find somebody who has this healthy Github contribution history and wastes a lot of their spare time fucking around on computers. That fits me but the fact is it simply shouldn’t be a requirement. a Team shouldn’t be comprised of one type of software developer. And that applies to both attitude as well as demographic.

There is also this weird idea that a software developer that doesn’t work on software in their spare time is some kind of perversion. "So what personal projects do you have?" is a question I can answer but if somebody cannot answer it or the answer is "none" I don’t get why that is an instant minus point. I mean bridge building engineers/contractors don’t get points taken off in interviews if they don’t spend their spare time designing and building bridges, but somehow in software development there is this implicit idea that we must all dedicate all of our spare time to it. Just because somebody doesn’t like to work on software in their spare time doesn’t mean they aren’t going to be absolutely spectacular at it. Hell if anything it’s those of us who finish work and basically just switch to a personal project that are trying to compensate by constantly cramming for the next workday. As if we have to constantly combat our own ineptitude by repetition at all times.

I think the relatively recent "pushback" to the idea of actually introducing any sort of diversity by trying to break up the self-perpetuating loop of young white guys only wanting to work with other young white guys really illustrated how necessary it was. You had people (young white male nerds, surprise) complaining about "diversity quotas" and basically starting with the flawed assumption that the reason that their team consisted of young white male nerds was because they were the most qualified. No, it was because the rest of the team was young white male nerds and anybody else being considered had to meet these ridiculous lengths to prove themselves before they even get considered as fitting the "culture" because the culture is one of- you guessed it, young, white, male nerds. A mediocre "young white male nerd" is often more likely to get hired than a demonstrably more skilled person of a different race or (god forbid, apparently), a woman.

Even an older guy is probably less likely to be brought on board. You can have some grizzled older software veteran at 50 who has forgotten more than the rest of the team knows put together but him not memorizing modern frameworks and buzzwords is going to prevent him from coming on board, even though he’s bringing on board countless skills and experience that no amount of github commits can hope to bring a "young white male nerd". Can you imagine how much ridiculous skill and ability a woman who is 60 would have to bring to the table to get hired as a software developer? You get these 24 something white dudes "well I wrote an expression evaluator" and the interviewer is like "Oh cool and it even does complex numbers, awesome" but a 60-year old woman could be like "well, I wrote a perfect simulation of the entire universe down to the atom, with a speed of 1 plank every 2 seconds, as you can see on my resume" And the completely unimpressed interviewer would be like "Yeah but we’re looking for somebody with CakePHP experience"

I think "young white male nerds" reject the idea that they have any sort of privilege in this field because they feel it means they didn’t work as hard. Well, yeah. We didn’t. get over it. We had things handed to us easily that we wouldn’t have if we were older, a different race, or women. We need to stop complaining that reality doesn’t match our ego and trying to stonewall what we term "diversity hires" and actually respect the fact that we aren’t a fucking master race of developers and women and minorities are fully capable of working in software, and cherrypicking racist and sexist statistics to support the perpetuation of the blindingly-white sausage fest just makes us look like babies trying to deny reality.

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