I find that last observation very interesting. Decades ago, my Reserves unit was extremely diverse compared to every IT environment I've ever worked in since then. I had a female sergeant, a black SFC platoon leader... In my civilian career I had exactly one female superior and I worked with exactly three black people, ever, so far, as numerous people have noted IT is super non-diverse.
The prevailing strategy in the civilian world to improve things, under the assumption that non-diversity is bad, seems to be to bring the diversity numbers up, surely achieving military support unit levels of diversity is numerically impossible but a little higher would be realistic, and pounding out bad behavior although surely not as effectively as the military pounds out bad behavior. Then things will magically be better. Apparently at least sometimes that strategy is unsuccessful as the military is obviously vastly far superior to civilian environments by both metrics yet the result is not superior.
Of course there might be sample size anecdotal issues, etc.
If the observed primary civilian strategy is measurably and comparatively a failure mode, then what strategies DO work?
I suspect part of the disconnect is that not all the ex-mil folks I've worked with were coming from support units: overall the military still has a lower percentage of women than software development does, and it was even lower when some of the people I was working with were enlisted. Also, although as a civilian I would never make such generalizations, it does seem that different branches attract different kinds of people.
Military hiring, of taking all comers over certain transparently-published bars and then turfing out bad actors and training the rest, is a strategy I'm not sure any tech company has tried. I've long wanted to compare our interviewing strategies to "random" to see if our screening actually contributing anything to outcomes.
It's not that there is nothing that could be learned, but as a woman I wouldn't use someone's veteran status as signal on whether or not they are likely to be sexist.
> Military hiring, of taking all comers over certain transparently-published bars and then turfing out bad actors and training the rest, is a strategy I'm not sure any tech company has tried. I've long wanted to compare our interviewing strategies to "random" to see if our screening actually contributing anything to outcomes.
This is an amazing point. I've never really thought about it before. Thanks!
The prevailing strategy in the civilian world to improve things, under the assumption that non-diversity is bad, seems to be to bring the diversity numbers up, surely achieving military support unit levels of diversity is numerically impossible but a little higher would be realistic, and pounding out bad behavior although surely not as effectively as the military pounds out bad behavior. Then things will magically be better. Apparently at least sometimes that strategy is unsuccessful as the military is obviously vastly far superior to civilian environments by both metrics yet the result is not superior.
Of course there might be sample size anecdotal issues, etc.
If the observed primary civilian strategy is measurably and comparatively a failure mode, then what strategies DO work?