51–60 of 504 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. This gets to the core of the issue: in a late stage capitalistic society, meaningful social change ONLY happens when it is aligned with business incentives.
Late stage?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. This gets to the core of the issue: in a late stage capitalistic society, meaningful social change ONLY happens when it is aligned with business incentives.
Late stage?
Honestly, the more I read about all those "diversity initiatives", "outreach campaigns" and "pushes to increase H1B" caps - the more I wonder about the intent and motivation of the people pulling the strings and funding the groups fighting so hard to further those causes. My comment is only tangentially related to hiring practices. Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously…
Expanding the hiring pool is valuable to these companies. Many companies also feel like they'll perform better with a more diverse group of employees. I sure felt like that about my company. They probably _also_ feel like it's right. This is one of those social problems where both the business need and moral need match up. My guess is that people who want racial diversity want class diversity, diversity of thought, c…
One good historical example is labor force inclusion of women. For centuries, women were excluded from most professions. Circa 1970, women got only 10% of law and medicine degrees. They hit parity in the mid-aughts. Are doctors or lawyers making less? No. The expanded pool of applicants means as a society we're getting either more or better doctors and lawyers, so as a society we're wealthier. And things are undeniably fairer. Economic and social incentives coincide.
Honestly, the more I read about all those "diversity initiatives", "outreach campaigns" and "pushes to increase H1B" caps - the more I wonder about the intent and motivation of the people pulling the strings and funding the groups fighting so hard to further those causes. My comment is only tangentially related to hiring practices. Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously…
1. That the candidate pool matches the general population.
2. That the company is discriminating against this candidate pool, leading to skewed demographics.
For some reason, assumption (1) seems to be implicitly trusted, and all blame fall to assumption (2) -- that is, that any deviation from the general population is somehow the fault of the company. I would posit that assumption (1) is typically not true. For instance, we know from studies that the STEM candidate pool for women is smaller than the general population, due to university dropout. It is impossible for every STEM company to have a population distribution of women that matches the general population. Reverse applies to, say, nursing or teaching, which have larger-than-expected numbers of women. (I'll leave it to the reader to make their own conclusions about why we aren't reading about diversity problems in such fields.)
What we need is more failure and strong character rather than handouts and diversity managers.
The big result there is this: "Poor performances in technical interviewing happen to most people, even people who are generally very strong. However, when we looked at our data, we discovered that after a poor performance, women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men." On the hiring side, "For the specific case of an online job posting, on average, 1,000 individuals will see a job post, 200 will begin th…
That is a pretty huge statistic, - what also pops out to me is: "stop practicing ". This seems to imply that these technical interviews are skills that you don't really gain on the job. I know that personally would 9 times out of 10 spend time on a cool / beneficial project rather than making time to practice trivia problems.
Honestly, the more I read about all those "diversity initiatives", "outreach campaigns" and "pushes to increase H1B" caps - the more I wonder about the intent and motivation of the people pulling the strings and funding the groups fighting so hard to further those causes. My comment is only tangentially related to hiring practices. Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously…
> At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". Too many underrepresented groups would be a nicer way of putting it. > Should it follow the US racial distribution? Would that not be fairest? > Since race is only skin deep It's about institutionalized racism, so race is what we should be looking at. Besides, y…
Only if everyone wants to do it equally. We haven't had enough experience with non-discrimination yet to figure out if this is the case or not.
I've been in software tech for nearly 30 years. Never had a "technical" interview, puzzle solving, or anything like that. I would not take a job that screened candidates that way. If references and credentials and track record aren't enough, I would look elsewhere.
I've been in software tech for nearly 20. Only once did I take a job which didn't require coding in the interview process. I quickly regretted it. It is amazingly easy for BS artists to look good on references, credentials, and their presented track record. And yet fail fizzbuzz.
So what? Just fire them quickly. Or put people who aren't so naive in charge of the hiring process.
Most of the time the actual problem is that "hiring managers" aren't practicing their trade anymore, and even in a simple conversation aren't sufficiently able to sniff out extremely obvious underqualified candidates who wouldn't be able to solve fizzbuzz.
Here's perhaps a good test for hiring managers. Have them interview 10 people who would normally apply, and just have a conversation. Make sure at least one person can't solve fizzbuzz. Ask the hiring manager to predict whether each candidate can or can't solve fizzbuzz based on their conversation. Anything less than 100% predictive accuracy and you can't be a hiring manager.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a pretty huge statistic, - what also pops out to me is: "stop practicing ". This seems to imply that these technical interviews are skills that you don't really gain on the job. I know that personally would 9 times out of 10 spend time on a cool / beneficial project rather than making time to practice trivia problems.
> these technical interviews are skills that you don't really gain on the job I believe that's definitely the case. That's why I shifted my interviews to be as much like the work as possible. First round was a pair programming interview plus a bit of technical discussion. Second round was kicking around a feature and its implementation with the team. My goal was also to see people at their best, so I did as much as p…
I suppose it was a toy feature. Isn't it detrimental to the teams performance if all of them have to be present at the interview?