I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
If your number one priority as a company is to make money, you're going to go out of business.
That's the number one priority of a company, especially in the US. Individuals in it might have different priorities (and I'd hope they do!) but don't kid yourself about capitalism. If the company wants to implement equal hiring policies it is entirely because they have evaluated (risk of being fined by the government + sued + bad PR) > (risk of extra expense of paying maternity leave).
Some companies definitely do operate simply to make money, most of which struggle immensely to do so, and waste a ton of money in the process.
Profit is definitely a priority. But most companies exist for other reasons, and focusing solely on making money often leads to huge booms and bust.
As for the second part of your comment. You're missing some important pieces of information. Happy employees are much more productive. And a diverse workforce is almost always more productive. High productivity leads to higher profit margins. Think about this, would you say your code is "better" (more maintainable, cleaner, faster, flexible, whatever) when you're working 80 hours a week, or 40? For me personally the quality of my code drops off sharply after 8 hours of work. Plenty of studies confirm this notion, and most project leads I've worked with have agreed (though not all were in a position to actually improve working conditions).
Companies have a vested interest in a diverse and happy work force. If they decide not to hire a women simply because she might take time off, then the assumption is they're picking a "worse" developer who in the long run will cost them more.
So they'd trade short term profit for long term profit by hiring the better developer, even if they end up paying for maternity leave.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
That's the number one priority of a company, especially in the US. Individuals in it might have different priorities (and I'd hope they do!) but don't kid yourself about capitalism. If the company wants to implement equal hiring policies it is entirely because they have evaluated (risk of being fined by the government + sued + bad PR) > (risk of extra expense of paying maternity leave).
Some companies definitely do operate simply to make money, most of which struggle immensely to do so, and waste a ton of money in the process.
Profit is definitely a priority. But most companies exist for other reasons, and focusing solely on making money often leads to huge booms and bust.
As for the second part of your comment. You're missing some important pieces of information. Happy employees are much more productive. And a diverse workforce is almost always more productive. High productivity leads to higher profit margins. Think about this, would you say your code is "better" (more maintainable, cleaner, faster, flexible, whatever) when you're working 80 hours a week, or 40? For me personally the quality of my code drops off sharply after 8 hours of work. Plenty of studies confirm this notion, and most project leads I've worked with have agreed (though not all were in a position to actually improve working conditions).
Companies have a vested interest in a diverse and happy work force. If they decide not to hire a women simply because she might take time off, then the assumption is they're picking a "worse" developer who in the long run will cost them more.
So they'd trade short term profit for long term profit by hiring the better developer, even if they end up paying for maternity leave.
And that's seen by the company as something that's good because it means they will make more money.
Yes, vested as in "profitably motivated".
Yes... Lol. I didn't say it's not a priority at all. My point was it's about more than just the fines they're avoiding.