> There are artificial barriers, based on gender/race/class/whatever that make it marginally harder for some people to contribute.
Can you provide an example of the barriers of which you speak? I find that a lot of the time I'm told about how people with qualities distinct from mine should be cut some slack or given extra incentives to get into industry to correct some sort of imbalance, and that the imbalance is somehow evidence of barriers that we can't see, and that incentivising these groups (and in effect putting barriers up against people like me) is the way forward.
To me, discrimination is discrimination, regardless. I don't take issue with any qualities of anyone - the right person for the job is the right person for the job. Perhaps historically barriers meant that the right person for the job was a white male (bearing in mind societal pressures, the availability of education and options etc.) and the prevalence of white males is a hangover, if so like all hangovers it will die down.
What I do know is that in my profession (technical infosec) there's a hard time finding talent, but that's because your average graduate student won't cut it. So we're stuck in a pool where you have a subset of CS grads, with some security interest and experience, subset of which have a particular mindset and abilities, and in turn a subset of which won't run away at the prospect of learning a staggering amount of information about systems, programs and all kinds of stuff are what you're after. Then on top of that I get told that because there's a skew further up the chain that I should incentivise particular groups to 'correct an imbalance' I have no direct control over.
