Announcing The Fog Creek Fellowship

&gt; Additionally, all fellows will have 1:1 pair programming sessions with their mentors. Fog Creek currently has a 0.4% acceptance rate for full-time developers; The fellows will be working with the best in the industry.<p>I understand what fogcreek was tryiing to communicate here but I chuckled at this as it flies in the face of something joel said about how everyone thinks they are hiring the top 1%<p>&gt; <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;items&#x2F;2005&#x2F;01&#x2F;27.html</a><p>On a more serious note....Congratulations to FogCreek, atleast they are trying to do something here rather than just complaining about it on internet forums:)

Fellowship?<p>It&#x27;s my personal opinion, and it might not be very popular, but I&#x27;ve never seen a company making such ho-hum products being so pompous as Fog Creek. (Well, StackOverflow is great. But it&#x27;s not a Fog Creek business per se, and it&#x27;s probably more due to Jeff).<p>One might say 37 Signals, but 37 Signals has written New York Time best-selling books, created the most celebrated web framework of the last decade, and has a bunch of web products people love to use. Plus, I don&#x27;t find them much pompous anyway, just good at self-promotion, which is a different thing.

Great initiative. Reading Joel&#x27;s blog was a fun and inspiring part of growing up in the programming world. As a woman in CS, I look forward to see this expanded to allow more of us to participate, not just NYC residents.

Great firm, but I still can&#x27;t ever imagine wanting to (or being compelled to) eat lunch with the rest of my team every day.

A female developer I once employed was from Singapore. She told me that in Singapore there is no noticeable gender discrepancy in IT.<p>How accurate was she? I don&#x27;t know. If she was correct, then it suggests that the enormous over-representation in IT in the US and some other countries may be due solely to cultural reasons.

<p><pre><code> In the past, we’ve focused on our intern pipeline by recruiting heavily from schools with high percentages of female students. We’ve hosted and sponsored hackathons and events with a focus on women in tech. We provide continuing education programs for female employees who want to learn how to code. These efforts have helped some, but it’s not enough. </code></pre> This topic has become VERY popular of late and is considered by most people to be such a worthy cause. Can I be a voice of dissent?<p>If you&#x27;ve tried this hard to hire your fair share of female developers and you still haven&#x27;t been able to do it, is it possible that trying to force it to happen may be the wrong approach? Perhaps it is the case that there just are not females who want to be developers at Fog Creek.<p>The problem with equality, even equal opportunity, is that it is not realistic (the world doesn&#x27;t naturally provide equal opportunity) and it creates as much discrimination as it purports to abolish.

Ugh.. Disgusting. What about other disparities? This is a company that is famously elitist and now they seem to have jumped on this &#x27;gender parity&#x27; bandwagon for brownie points.<p>Lets give more opportunities to the most mollycoddled social class ( white women) in the history of humanity.