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How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

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Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#41

Post by dclowd9901 »

OP is unbelievable.

> I completely agree. I’ve interviewed people from MIT who weren’t familiar with a hash table and the best software developer I’ve worked with never went to college. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, didn’t go to a top CS school. However, it’s still the case that college and experience is an imperfect signal of ability.

In other words: Here's all of these great reasons I've found not to trust someone's schooling as a good indicator of their ability, but I'm going to use it anyway.

OP is what's wrong with tech hiring.

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#42

Post by mseebach »

rmartelli wrote: post #33
mseebach wrote: post #4

> My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education. This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity activist" might say…

Sorry that it's hard to believe. My CEO was previously an activist so the people brought in to talk are definitely outside what you would expect in corporate America. Unfortunately it's hard to find sources for this except for internal videos. A quote from one of the trainers that gets at the same idea: "In sourcing diverse candidates, it is imperative to avoid criteria that are inherently biased, like using school s…

There's nothing in that quote that goes anywhere near "assum[ing] that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education".

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#43

Post by dclowd9901 »

acctjustforyou wrote: post #31
pessimizer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when did a college degree become a requirement for programming, or indicate a higher quality of programmer? I know CS graduates who have no ability to program. Half of these big companies have been started by dropouts, and the oldest ones were started when there was no such thing as a CS degree.

The fact that a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good programmer does not mean it is a worthless data point.

I'd say overwhelming evidence points to the exact contrary.

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#44

Post by ch4s3 »

yarper wrote: post #40
ch4s3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the societal/cultural factors I'm talking about is the caregiver's burden. Children, the elderly, and the infirmed are typically(at least in the US) cared for by women. This is a significant time suck. I'm just saying you shouldn't penalize a woman for not doing side projects, she may have more important shit to do in her nonworking hours. And for that matter, you shouldn't penalize anyone for not writing a to…

So there's no correlation in skill between the people that put hours of their own time into honing their craft, and those that don't?

Maybe, maybe not. I suppose that depends on what and how they choose to practice. And there's nothing wrong with giving positive weight to personal projects. I'm just saying you shouldn't penalize people for spending their personal time on things other than coding.

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#45

Post by actionwords »

eastbayjake wrote: post #20

This is a strawman that doesn't even attempt a charitable summary of opposing arguments. There is one link to an actual opponent's arguments and it's some random consultant/speaker's blog, not anyone actually being paid to advise on tech hiring diversity. Here's an attempt at a charitable characterization: Lots of heuristics for quickly evaluating programming skill may inadvertently toss out qualified applicants or g…

protip: they don't favor white men -- Asians are vastly over represented in silicon valley. white men are actually underrepresented. your entire line of argumentation is off base.

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#46

Post by rmartelli »

ch4s3 wrote: post #26

I'm sorry, but this post seems totally fabricated or at least intentionally misrepresenting what is happening. I spend a lot of time reading about diversity initiatives in tech and I'm trying to set up an initiative where I work. However, I've never heard anyone suggest lowering the bar in the ways listed in this article. The whole thing is constructed as reductio ad absurdum. For example: >Stop considering some coll…

Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. To eliminate structural sexism, we must remove hiring criteria that favors men. Let's tell our sourcers that looking for relevant industry experience is not important.

For school I've been told that we should look if they have a degree or not, and not consider which institution. This explicitly considers all colleges the same.

Every point in the post is an actual suggestion made on how to improve diversity. Obviously not all the suggestions have been implemented, but I'm afraid the committee for improving hiring might do just that.

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#47

Post by acctjustforyou »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #41

OP is unbelievable. > I completely agree. I’ve interviewed people from MIT who weren’t familiar with a hash table and the best software developer I’ve worked with never went to college. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, didn’t go to a top CS school. However, it’s still the case that college and experience is an imperfect signal of ability. In other words: Here's all of these great reasons I've found not to trust someo…

"There exists a young man with no legs who has a stellar collegiate wrestling record.

There also exists an athlete in the most prestigious wrestling program in the country who always loses because he never makes weight, and when he does make weight, he gets defeated in seconds.

Therefore I can confidently conclude that 'number of limbs' has no correlation whatsoever to wrestling ability."

Hmmm...

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#48

Post by acctjustforyou »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #43
acctjustforyou wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good programmer does not mean it is a worthless data point.

I'd say overwhelming evidence points to the exact contrary.

Sounds like you've found a great indicator of skill then - "does not have a CS degree."

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#49

Post by acctjustforyou »

darod wrote: post #14

Not sure what this author is complaining about? The goal was to achieve diversity and they seemed to have done it by hiring an ex-googler who is female. The author seems to be giving a rant because he had to do more work than calling up his buddy. BTW Temple University is not an HBCU

>BTW Temple University is not an HBCU

Which means that instead of one HBCU being ranked on the US News list of best colleges for Computer Science [1] (albeit at the very bottom), there are zero.[2]

[1] - http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

[2] - http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#50

Post by acctjustforyou »

yarper wrote: post #36
danpalmer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been given the "not looking for a portfolio" one before, but it was explained in more detail to me as - to put work up online opens yourself up to criticism, and given the sexism in our industry, this criticism can more easily become abuse when targeted at women, and therefore there are a not-insignificant group of women who do not publish code on GitHub because of abuse - this issue affects men less, therefore,…

I agree that makes more sense than the childcare argument. I'd still wonder though - what are this person's interests in tech? What do they do in pursuing those interests? I think these are legitimate questions, since one of the best metrics for success in software is the level of interest you hold in it.

>I think these are legitimate questions

They are, and the fact that you even have to defend asking them is a non-trivial indicator of how bat-shit crazy the thinking has gotten on this topic.

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