Reginald Braithwaite

Really, Reginald, are you a fellow Ontarian?

That you might be living in Ontario was one of my surprises on first reading http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign ... i would not normally read you however i follow Martin Fowler and he wrote this today: https://twitter.com/#!/martinfowler/status/187159051698835458

Did you really resign as Director of Software Development over this issue? Or, is that just you being a creative essayist? aside: when bloggers arrived, it seems essayists became extinct.

One thing is certain ... i now see at least one use for an iPad.

Also, apparently i made an error in judgement on removing the fact that i've been programming for 45+ years ... more if you let me count overtime. FWIW, i'm still learning to program ... it's nice to glean from your article that i might be better off to simply sue every prospect who fails to give me an interview. unfortunately, i, up to seconds ago, assumed that i could file a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights commission ... but as of a minute ago at http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/issues/age, i learned:

"On June 30, 2008, the role of the Ontario Human Rights Commission changed. The Commission will no longer accept complaints of discrimination."

The same page in the link above does tell me that i'm protected from age discrimination. Hmmmm. Perhaps i could complain to Bashir al-Assad? Hmmmm, again, i just noticed there's an Ass in al-Assad.

In November 2009, i began working for a company where i…

> what exactly do you believe?

This is something that I'm still actively exploring. I only have an understanding from a high level on all of this; the details are quite fuzzy to me.

To give you some background, I'm coming from what's basically the a hardcore right-libertarian place. However, eventually, I've come around to realizing that the world is a bit more complex than "remove the rules and everything will work out." I was only thinking about some of the rules, I had just assumed that capitalism was the way things _had_ to be. The more that I compared my beliefs about capitalism to my former beliefs about religion, the more I came to understand that I believed in those things simply because they were stated to me as fact for a long period of time.

Anyway, what I believe: I don't really believe in a police force, to be totally honest. I've said before that "I'm a middle class white kid from the suburbs, so if I don't like the police, I can only imagine what it must be like for others." I try to avoid as much contact with police as possible, because they only cause more problems. I think that social constructs hold society together much more than the threat of punishment. People respond much better to positive reinforcement than negative. Authority will always be abused.

In general, I believe the world would be a better place if we tried working together rather than fighting. If people actually knew their neighbors and built communities. If more people gave rather…

One fascinating aspect of this is how bad the post 1990 startup culture has been for women. There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered.

You can see female interest in programming change in the charts on these pages:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-computer-science-visual-trendline

Note that those graphs show raw numbers, not a percentage of the population -- if you adjust for the growing population, female graduation rates in computer science peak in the 1980s. As it says in the text:

"As a share of all CS bachelor's degrees granted that year, females had slipped almost 10 points, from 37% in 1984/1985 to 27% in 2003."

A family anecdote: my mom was working on her Phd in urban planning back in the 1970s and her advisor said to her "You know, in the future, many of these issues of traffic and resource allocation will be resolved through computer simulations, so you should learn to program." My mom thought that was a good idea so she took some classes and learned basic programming. She does not recall feeling like an outsider in those classes: the computer field was still new and felt wide open.

Nowadays a lot of startups talk about the need for "culture fit". This tends to limit the diversity of the gender and race and class of who is hired. For contrast, consider people like Evelyn Boyd Granville, and her acceptance at…

Congratulations on the launch and the beautiful work you're producing. I'd love to hear your feedback on the very popular discussion from a few days ago here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134) on Raganwald's blog, "I don't hire unlucky people" (http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people) .
Specifically, I'm curious as to how much you as the creator of this service think making a resume standout really helps an applicant compared to a bland resume from a measurably more qualified candidate? Thanks!

A snippet from the blog...
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“First, I stopped caring so much about little things like how 'professionally' a resume was formatted or whether the cover email had spelling mistakes. I realized that throwing people away because of a spelling mistakes was really another way of discarding half the resumés because you don’t want to work with unlucky people.”

“Wait,” said Oscar, “but surely all things being equal, the person who takes the time to get the email right is better than the person who doesn’t?”

“Sure,” agreed Ernestine, “But all other things aren’t equal. What if the email with the spelling mistake came from someone who’s really busy because they’re talented and have a lot to do in their current position?”
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> "Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is also a great idea to cite - who cares about one's representation?

It does not 'equal' racism, but then again I don't want to even use the word "racism" in a discussion unless I'm 100% confident everybody agrees on the definition. All too often in discussions like this, I encounter people who have their own pet definitions for the meaning of words like "equality" and "freedom" and "racism/racist."

Now I'm guessing you are posting a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it as if you have an open mind and want to hear from people with a diversity of viewpoints. I don't measure results by representation, but I care deeply about removing obstacles to equal representation

> Profits are what matters

To you. Not to me. Or at least, not more than equality of opportunity.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-keep

> This sounds like libertarianism to me, not socialism (small S or not.)

My feeling is you've not read some of raganwald's other writings which more clearly explicate socialism, the way he's using it here:

"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society. They generally share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth within a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through a system of exploitation. They argue that this creates an unequal society that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential."[1]

[1] http://raganwald.posterous.com/hello-my-name-is-reginald-and-i-am-a-socialis