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You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#241

Post by TeffenEllis »

markonthewall wrote: post #179
ucarion wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just political correctness. The socially optimal future is one in which anyone, regardless of race and gender, can become a software engineer. Someday, we're going to put in effort to move from our current world to this better future. Software engineering is a highly-desirable, well-paying, forward-looking job and it's still early days. Why not give it a shot? There are of course many PC-police types who can…

Sometimes I wonder if software engineers are half as smart as they think they are. I can't think of any precedent or similar situation: a corps of highly skilled workers pro-actively sabotaging themselves in order to share the fate of their country's dying middle class: longer hours, shrinking salaries and cut-throat competition for employment. I am glad that I have some fuck-you money now. Because the prospects as s…

I agree on the surface of your argument though it's not as bleak as we fear.

While I don't think it's intentionally malicious, the current "cult" dev culture disempowers developers. I think there's two competing movements; the attempt to make programming more like engineering, and the belief that programming is an art.

For the software engineer camp, programming is quantified and implicitly egalitarian. The mantra is "the work speaks for itself" for these folks.

For the creative camp, programming isn't so easily measured and turned on or off.

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. The first step to solving a problem is being able to talk about it. Many people of all genders and races are interested in being developers. They just don't want to give up their lives to do so.

Imagine being in an interview and being asked about golf balls and school busses. On the other side of the table is a suitcase with $100k. Is it really reasonable to ask them to shake things up when their livelihood is on the line?

The good news is that for all the warts software has, there are no barriers other than personal determination. Anyone can be a developer so long as they're interested.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#242

Post by tw04 »

Fomite wrote: post #206
tw04 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical strength tends to be an extremely important part of being a nurse. There's no shortage of women being represented there. As for the above: my garbage "man" is a woman, so it has nothing to do with physical strength. The truck picks up the can and has for at least 5 years in even the most Podunk town.

One of the things currently being tangled with, in nursing (because contrary to the usual assertion, the profession does worry about this) is the tendency for male nurses to get assigned to difficult patients who need restraint, and what that means for their occupational health.

It shouldn't be though, that's kind of the point. Directing people to a profession to make the representation equal is both counter-productive and IMO HURTS us as a whole because you end up with people pursuing a career they potentially hate because someone gave them a scholarship or promised them more money for doing so.

If more women than men want to be nurses, awesome, let them. If men are intentionally NOT being hired to be nurses that WANT to be nurses simply because they are men, THAT is a problem we need to fix. In the same token, if more men want to be programmers than women, awesome, let them. If companies are intentionally not hiring women for being women, FIX IT!

But PLEASE stop creating problems where they don't exist. I have no desire to take care of other people and the though of being a nurse is about the worst possible day job I could imagine. I'm willing to bet most nurses would rather stab themselves in the face than sit at a computer all day writing code too. Are we as a society really going to sit there and tell them they're wrong? They're just confused and would really love to program if they just are forced into it?

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#243

Post by generic_user »

Fomite wrote: post #205
throwaway420 wrote: post #148

I'm waiting with great anticipation for the politically correct outcry to solve the problem of not enough women being represented in the mining, construction, sanitation, logging, or deep sea fishing industries, or for there be a popular movement to get more men into teaching or nursing where they're also dramatically underrepresented there. Let's see if there's any intellectual honesty here, or maybe there's somethi…

Both nursing and teaching have been wrestling with how to get more men into those professions for well over a decade, and the number of men in nursing has been rising for the past three decades.

> Both nursing and teaching have been wrestling with how to get more men into those professions for well over a decade

Where is this wrestling?

Surely the disparity in gender is the result of Misandy at every level of the Nursing industry and these evil Woman should be held to account for there tyrannical Matriarchy.

Where are the media stories about institutionalized Gender bias in Nursing.

Where is the Diversity industry setting up organisations to promote 50/50 Male Female Nursing gender ratio?

Where is the call to lower or scrap Nursing standards to accommodate under skilled Men because its the right thing to do?

I'm not holding my breath.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#244

Post by farright »

trhway wrote: post #11
Animats wrote: post #5

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…

logically unexplainable multiple rejections just after very short interactions by seemingly picky capricious agents on the other side of the interactions - isn't it that the men have biologically wired in them as a normal thing to expect, doesn't matter be it dating or sales or tech interview...

And be confident! Interviewers love confidence.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#245

Post by AvenueIngres »

ubernostrum wrote: post #229
aantix wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the larger the body of employees, this becomes more and more the case. But if you're hiring your second engineer on the team? Hire the absolute most productive engineer. Even if that turns out to be a white male. And don't feel guilty.

Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive", because there is no reading of your comment which makes sense without the assumption that you believe this. Congratulations, you've exposed yourself as possessing irrational biases and allowing them to influence how you'd hire, while showing no desire to eliminate, overcome or…

>Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive"

No

>Congratulations, you've exposed yourself as possessing irrational biases

That's rich coming from someone who just made a completely biased reading of the parent comment to fuel their narrative.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#246

Post by spacebat »

theseatoms wrote: post #28
GuiA wrote: post #27

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?

everyone has access to products the consumption of which threaten the ecological underpinnings of the society in which they live, but generally consume more of these products anyway

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#247

Post by taneq »

morgante wrote: post #204
taneq wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the start of our teens, we lose the intrinsic value that society places on us as children. For many boys, after this, their only worth is in what they can accomplish, for themselves or for others. For many girls, they learn that they are intrinsically valuable as women, as long as they're attractive. It's not an issue of 'explaining' the odds. It's an issue of women knowing that they're worth something in and of t…

Wouldn't the message of "you are your accomplishments" make men more likely to give up after a failure rather than less?

Subtle(ish) distinction: You aren't your past accomplishments, you are your capability to generate future accomplishments.

Who is more likely to persevere; someone who believes they have to keep achieving things or they are worthless, or someone to whom achievements are a nice bonus to the intrinsic value that they already have?

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#248

Post by ubernostrum »

AvenueIngres wrote: post #245
ubernostrum wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive", because there is no reading of your comment which makes sense without the assumption that you believe this. Congratulations, you've exposed yourself as possessing irrational biases and allowing them to influence how you'd hire, while showing no desire to eliminate, overcome or…

>Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive" No >Congratulations, you've exposed yourself as possessing irrational biases That's rich coming from someone who just made a completely biased reading of the parent comment to fuel their narrative.

So provide me with an interpretation of "just hire the best" -- as a response to critiques of the lack of diversity in tech -- which does not imply or require an assumption that currently-underrepresented groups are, by the nature of the people in those groups, less qualified and thus less likely to be "the best".

Because you can't provide that. "Just hire the best" is an excuse for biased interviewing and hiring processes which self-reinforce; you claim to "hire the best" and then actually hire based on your biases and claim those are "the best".

It turns out not to work:

http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

http://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#249

Post by pjscott »

Houshalter wrote: post #77

Interviews in general have a lot of problems: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_out... >Unstructured interviews reliably degrade the decisions of gatekeepers (e.g. hiring and admissions officers, parole boards, etc.). Gatekeepers (and SPRs) make better decisions on the basis of dossiers alone than on the basis of dossiers and unstructured interviews. (Bloom and Brundage 1947, DeVaul et. al. 195…

The link you cited is talking specifically about "unstructured interviews", the sort where you're judged based on handshake firmness and questions like "What is your greatest weakness?" It shouldn't be too surprising that these are poor predictors of job performance.

Programming technical interviews are not supposed to be like that. They're supposed to be some mixture of a relevant-ish skills test and a plausibly-deniable IQ test. (One constraint here is that anything which is overtly an IQ test will make the company's lawyers get twitchy and start nervously trying to remember the details of the Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co.)

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#250

Post by acdha »

dethswatch wrote: post #203
theoh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If certain activities have a huge effect on how the world operates, which is kind of the premise of Y Combinator (software is eating the world, etc.) then it's important that the people who call the shots are representative of the people who are affected. This has to happen from the bottom up, since for obvious reasons you can't parachute in "untrained diversity" at a management/strategy level.

I'm not certain I see how C++ and SQL would be all that different if designed by women. Nor, for that matter, browsers, or perhaps word processors.

What about e.g. social apps where some communities face a much higher risk of receiving abuse?

Looking more broadly, it wasn't that long ago that you could easily find American software developers treating internationalisation as a frill or people talking about accessibility as a niche concern. (Now a growing percentage of people recognize that in addition to being the right thing to do, it also benefits more people than they thought due to temporary limits due to environment - ever see how many people use subtitles on the subway/bus?, illness/injury, distraction, etc.)

The key point for me is seeing this as a larger goal of encouraging as many people as possible to participate in building the technology right increasingly shapes our world. One key thing is that people aren't limited to certain types of contribution: there's probably no uniquely feminine contribution to C++ but how well the standards community works or how the language is designed will charge based on who's involved. If it's mostly very smart MIT grads, someone else might contribute not because of their race, gender, etc. but because their life experience has been different, and that's usually important for moving something out of the core guru community into broader usage.

Remember all of the guys who decried GUIs as unnecessary crutches when Real Men(tm) used a CLI? The problem wasn't that they were (generally) white men but simply that they had a very narrow view of what people wanted to do and how much training was reasonable to accept just to be able to check your email or edit a file. That's laughable now but it wasn't hard to find examples just a generation back.

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