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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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lighthearted cs drama

The grace hopper conference is supposed to be for women and gender minorities. Since they have recruiters there, the job market is tight, and there's no explicit policy against men showing up, men have been showing up. It looks like a lot of people are unhappy about this. The csmajors sub banned discussion of it, but there are still plenty of juicy threads up; in addition to the gender wars, a lot of the guys being international students adds a 'they're taking our jobs' flair to the fire. Since it's basically impossible to gatekeep nonbinary-ness, the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.

the job market is tight

What's going on in the U.S.? All these years I was hearing about how us IT europoors should just move to the promised land of the FAANGs, but I can't imagine being so desperate I'd attend a conference for recruitment purposes.

Interest rates, that's what's going on.

A lot of the IT markets (if definitely not all) was propped up by cheap money and the expectation that competitors would over hire so you should too. No longer. Now there's been huge layoffs and running a tight ship is back in fashion.

It's not really an issue for good graduates of good universities, but there is a sea of bootcamp people who want in, previously could and can no longer. And I'd grasp at any networking opportunity if I were in that situation.

The ECB is raising rates too. Maybe because we were so underpaid all the time, the European IT labor markets have been at a state of constant shortage, and we're just in a somewhat milder shortage now? All I know is the last few companies I worked for have been BEGGING me to recommend someone else they could hire.

It's not really an issue for good graduates of good universities, but there is a sea of bootcamp people who want in, previously could and can no longer. And I'd grasp at any networking opportunity if I were in that situation.

This is another thing that sounds bizarre to me. Good universities teach you to program?! The whole reason I'm in the field is that it's not credentialist. Whatever is going on with you Yankees, can you keep it on your side of the Atlantic?

Good universities teach you to program?! The whole reason I'm in the field is that it's not credentialist.

When I sat on the other side of the table interviewing candidates for a not high paying, not AAA games company programming roles there was a noticeable difference in quality between four year degree holders and the self-taughts, four year "schools" and bootcampers. That was observed from checking for quality but I can absolutely see people having done many more interviews like that start filtering resumes on proxies like a credential especially when getting significant numbers of them. Nowadays for field/market specific reasons I mostly deal with people who have a 4 year but not in CS who have "some programming" experience getting hired into professional software roles leading to years upon years of spaghetti.