I found a technique that worked well for me. I want to share with you and others, but I don’t want to come across as judging you in anyway. It’s hard to find great candidates of any sort. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my technique to every company, because it’s just not reasonable in all cases.
I’ve found that the best way to get a good mix of people hired onto the team is to do more than hope that it happens.
I had to get out to workshops, conferences, and meetups. Local universities had groups that I got in touch with. I had to make connections with the communities that I was looking to hire from. It was a lot of hard work.
But once you’ve developed those connections, candidates roll in with surprising regularity for a long time. After two years I had a team of 10 great devs with a 50/50 split between genders and a huge range of background and cultures. It was the most fun team to work with and we made awesome stuff.
I used to have this stance as well.
But my opinion on the situation changed when I noticed the ways that one class is waging war on the other classes in my country. There is real damage being done, real violence being perpetrated. Wage theft, poisoning the environment, suppressing voting and certain kinds of speech. Limited access to healthcare, limited access to education, limited access to the jobs that confer greater respect or mobility. Some people are living in a kind of hell and dying earlier because of it.
And those doing the violence are usually protected from the consequences of their actions by others in society saying just what you’ve said. “It’s okay to protest, but don’t inconvenience anyone while doing it”. “It’s theft to deny me the use of the road that you’re blocking with the protest or the building that you’re protesting in front of”.
I used to think that protests where everyone remained polite were the only ones I could respect. Other kinds of protests, where people were being disruptive were just hooligans acting out. I used to say those things.
Maybe this way of thinking helps to preserve in some small way the politeness of society. I doubt it’s effective at doing that in a meaningful way. And if there is a class of people who are oppressing another class, ending that oppression would be the most effective way of increasing the politeness of society as a whole, even if certain kinds of disruption was needed to get there.
One thing that I do know is true is that saying these things does help the bully class to continue doing what they are doing. They aren’t going to stop just because someone asked nicely. They are being protected by words like this. And that’s not okay.