Today I'm launching something near and dear to my heart...VERY near and dear 😂 -- a podcast project with my phenomenal favorite neuroscientist (& wife), @analog_ashley !
On "Change, Technically" we're coming to your ears to share tales of who gets to be technical. We dig into STEM pathways & how leaders can learn from psych and neuroscience to think about cultivating innovation. We share our stories from classrooms to software teams. Plus new Cat & Ashley lore!
Mega warm thanks to @danilo who is our big-hearted and big-brained producer on this project! It's so fun to cook with you on the work and the hope we all believe in 🔥
@grimalkina @danilo
What a delightful episode! I learned a lot from this, and it has me thinking about how to meet people in their spheres of interest to contextualize coding. I'm not sure I'm equipped to do that, but it sounds like great fun!
Since I grew up in an age when essentially *all* coders were self-taught, it's weird to me that people think they are "the only one" who learned programming that way.
@bogosity That was my reaction as well. I both came of age at a time where a large number of coders were self taught (due to the personal computing revolution followed by the WWW revolution) and worked around physicists, electrical engineers, and astronomers who generally seemed to assume they could teach themselves to code and didn't need instruction (for good or ill...definitely ill in some cases 😄 ). It hadn't really occurred to me that times had likely changed and also norms might be different in other scientific disciplines. @grimalkina @danilo
@internic @bogosity @danilo Ashley and I both have spent most of our time working with people who have been discouraged by others at every turn and who have a need to have every credential in order to be given a chance so we're really aware of the other side...! This is definitely what I experience as a social scientist in tech vs having a degree in a field that people see as "math adjacent", even though I have often done relevant statistical work and some other person hasn't!
@internic @bogosity @danilo and these beliefs carry through in hiring way more than we might like, relative to the true state of where the skills are. I think one simple thing is that a lot of companies, every one I've ever consulted with on hiring, drastically overestimates how many people even have access to the degree pathway they are setting their filter by
@grimalkina Oh yeah, certainly if one is subject to prevailing biases that would question one's competence, then any formal recognition of expertise is more valuable. I guess I hadn't fully considered that beyond the more typically discussed dimensions of privilege there's also the question of whether your degree is in something considered to be "mathy" or "technical" nor that some of my experience with coding specifically may be highly historically contingent based on when I was learning it. @bogosity @danilo
@grimalkina On the hiring front, when I've been involved in making hiring decisions my issue has been that I recognize really great contributions can come from people who are self-taught or have less conventional backgrounds, but what isn't clear is how to recognize those people. Part of me thinks "just spend time with them and talk to them and you'll figure it out," but that also seems like the sort of highly subjective gut judgement where unconscious bias looms large, so I fear it might do more harm than good.
It is ironic that in the hiring where I've been involved, I'm often the only one in the discussion with a PhD, but I often find myself arguing not to weight education too strongly. My feeling is just that if you are trying to find someone to do task X, having actually done task X before is better evidence of capability than having been in a program that nominally teaches how to do X (especially if X isn't domain-specific research).
@internic love your thoughtfulness about this. Yes!! I think this is a super underappreciated thing. I don't know that I've articulated it on the podcast super eloquently yet 😅 but it blew my mind when I learned more about these layered biases that go deeper than just "STEM or not-STEM" & include associations we make about "pure intellect" & "technical prowess" (a non-STEM example is music). & ++ to the context of when we first learnt as a heritage we don't always see!
@bogosity @danilo