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It is review time at Amazon, and by posting this, I am avoiding working on peer feedback. :b
I have observed in the past, but it's especially apparent as a result of this exercise, that about 10% of the technical people* I work with or have worked with in the past are truly outstanding performers. In them, dedication, effort, and skill all combine into something that impresses even this cynic whose job and joy it is to find all the problems with a system under observation.
What strikes me about this is the distribution; maybe 5-7% of the men I've worked with have exhibited this, but for women, it's nearly all of them. In my experience, women in tech do a better job of getting requirements clear before they start working, think harder and more clearly about the implications and edge cases, work harder, and produce higher-quality results.
Do I think that means women are better-suited to technical problem spaces than men? Heck no. There's no significant difference between the best men and the best women in tech.
What it means is, the 93-95% of women who might have performed similarly to the average man in tech have been driven out at some point along their journey toward working with me. They're the girls who were ridiculed for being interested in math or science or computers in the first place, the women who didn't get the support they needed to succeed in college, the women who made it through school but found out that tech companies are a toxic cesspit of misogyny and dismissal and decided they didn't want to put up with it.
The women who made it this far did it by working twice as hard and twice as well as their male coworkers, for half the respect. (And two-thirds the pay, but I digress.)
* Due to lack of domain knowledge, context, and/or exposure, I don't consider myself qualified to judge the performance of non-technical folks, at least not at a scale that lets me draw general conclusions.
I have observed in the past, but it's especially apparent as a result of this exercise, that about 10% of the technical people* I work with or have worked with in the past are truly outstanding performers. In them, dedication, effort, and skill all combine into something that impresses even this cynic whose job and joy it is to find all the problems with a system under observation.
What strikes me about this is the distribution; maybe 5-7% of the men I've worked with have exhibited this, but for women, it's nearly all of them. In my experience, women in tech do a better job of getting requirements clear before they start working, think harder and more clearly about the implications and edge cases, work harder, and produce higher-quality results.
Do I think that means women are better-suited to technical problem spaces than men? Heck no. There's no significant difference between the best men and the best women in tech.
What it means is, the 93-95% of women who might have performed similarly to the average man in tech have been driven out at some point along their journey toward working with me. They're the girls who were ridiculed for being interested in math or science or computers in the first place, the women who didn't get the support they needed to succeed in college, the women who made it through school but found out that tech companies are a toxic cesspit of misogyny and dismissal and decided they didn't want to put up with it.
The women who made it this far did it by working twice as hard and twice as well as their male coworkers, for half the respect. (And two-thirds the pay, but I digress.)
* Due to lack of domain knowledge, context, and/or exposure, I don't consider myself qualified to judge the performance of non-technical folks, at least not at a scale that lets me draw general conclusions.