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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

#391

Post by monkey88 »

This is not about rejection and going on about the process. Yes, it is somewhat a numbers game, but what leads to rejection?

For a person of color to even get to the interview process, you have to be lucky. Now that you have a PoC in the room with other people, thay same PoC has to prove beyond their subconcious biases and prejudices that they are indeed, better than anybody else in the world for that job, including the interviewers. BUT at the same time, that PoC has to deal with the bias and not be too good, lest they offend the people conducting the interview, and not get offended by the blatant racist, misogynist, xenophobic comments that are going to show up in that interview.

Some examples? "Do you know ho to read email?". "So you are an expert, and you proved solving all these technical problems and your resume, but how exactly can you prove that you are an expert?". "You have an accent". "Our clients want someody more like them, white". "You are too exotic for our group".

Yes, all of those have happened.

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

#392

Post by dracht »

cagataygurturk wrote: post #120

Why diversity is needed to be fixed in the first place? Pizza business is dominated by italians and kebap by turkish, and nobody tries to fix diversity issues in those industries. Somehow every industry finds its own best people and the balance, I don't understand the need of fixing it. Nursery is dominated by women and men are underpresented there, should we also fix it?

Tech is hip, trendy and a desirable sector now - unlike, say, logging or mining. Some people feel like they are not only owed a seat at the table, but that there was a grand conspiracy in keeping them out of a field that not long ago only a certain group of people was interested in.

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

#393

Post by zigzigzag »

pzh wrote: post #199
zigzigzag wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a doubt that stat is because these companies have grown so fast. It's not that people leave after a year, it's that they have added tons of engineers in the last year (and have done so repeatedly for the last few years). I worked at Google. Turnover was really low. 10 year average stay doesn't sound unreasonable for me if you select only the employees that have left.

Maybe I misunderstand the metric, but isn't turnout calculated as the average tenure of people who leave? If the companies just add more engineers, this shouldn't affect the metric (unless you also count the tenure of people who are actually still working there, but that doesn't sound like a good way to estimate churn rate...) If that's the case, it seems there is quite a bit of confusion about this: https://www.bloo…

You didn't quote turnover figures, you quoted average time on the job.

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

#394

Post by aries1980 »

mrkurt wrote: post #282
aries1980 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart. Why not?

Because orgs are amoral.

If companies can have “culture”, they can have personality and morale / ethics as well.

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

#395

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mzw_mzw wrote: post #197
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…

>Given that level of rejection, the key here is to get women to know the odds and keep trying. Now that's an important fact that tends to get overlooked. Ninety-nine percent of the agitation about increasing "representation" tends to focus on accusing everyone of misogyny and attempting to destroy existing culture. But increasing the confidence level of female applicants, so they aren't put off by immediate rejection…

Let's be clear here, you need to do that for potential candidates far before the interview.

Otherwise you'd be choosing less confident candidates simply because they are female, that's sexism and unfair to those who aren't being prejudged as low confidence. If you need confident people who can still work after facing "rejection" you'd also be hobbling your organisation.

If I'm a low confidence male then your system is going to stack heavily against me because of my sex.

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

#396

Post by acdha »

exstudent2 wrote: post #283
acdha wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see anything incongruous in the way you are comfortable casually rejecting InclinedPlane's experience but using your personal experience to conclude that it's not a widespread problem?

Why is their experience more valid than mine? I'll go with my own observations before that of an HN commenter. Yes, I know that's what I am too.

Reread what I said and note that I didn't say you were definitely wrong, only that it's inconsistent to treat two anecdotal accounts in completely opposite ways. I'm entirely comfortable accepting that what you wrote is what you honestly believe but you're trying to argue that your limited personal experience represents an entire field so completely that everyone who says otherwise is either confused or lying.

If you want to convince anyone, post some actual data or peer-reviewed analysis. Otherwise it's just a question of whether this is garden variety argument from authority or some sort of stronger argument from Dunning-Kruger version.

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

#397

Post by scarface74 »

some people just aren't good at technical interviewing but on the other hand there are a lot of bad interviewers.

I work with a guy I interviewed that gave one of the worst interview performances I had done. He couldn't answer many of the technical questions correctly or only had a surface understanding of them. But, from asking him the soft skill questions I knew he would work well with our team. Then we gave him two simple programming assignment that many of the more senior developers we interviewed couldn't do. He didn't know the syntax of the language well, but you could tell from his thought process, the questions he asked, and how we solved the problem that he was as Joel Spolsky said "smart and gets stuff done".

I along with my manager fought to get him hired. We were right about him. He's very effective, diligent, and if I ever got my own team at another company, I would fight to bring him on to work with me.

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

#398

Post by mcv »

shados wrote: post #188

Let. us. fire. people. The current environment in tech is as follow: Someone goes through an interview process. Depending on the result, they get brought in or not. If they are brought in, they accept an offer. Usually it will contain some kind of language about blah blah trial period 3 months blah blah, sometimes in precise terminology, sometimes vaguely. If someone is absolutely useless right off the bat, immediate…

Do you have to give people a permanent contract right away in the US? In Netherland, people usually get a temporary contract at first, and then a permanent one. Too much uncertainty isn't good of course, but half a year to prove yourself is not unreasonable, I think.

(Though there are Dutch companies that abuse it by extending temporary contracts without ever giving a permanent contract, and sometimes even let good employees go because they don't want to give them a permanent contract.)

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

#399

Post by pluma »

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?

Sure, but "giving up" is frowned upon even more than failing. Nobody wants to be a "quitter".

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

#400

Post by Lio »

ubernostrum wrote: post #232
tomp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you forgetting that different people, even different groups of people, have different motivations? E.g. in general, men like cars, gym and climbing; women like jewellery, yoga and dancing. These are all voluntary activities (well, you could argue that things like gym and jewellery are socially motivated), yet different sexes in average choose differently. Why wouldn't it be the same with careers?

Are you assuming that there is some genetic or evolutionary reason for men to like cars? That somehow it is hard-coded into the Y chromosome to like cars? Or have you considered the possibility that social conditioning can make a large difference in what hobbies and preferences someone ends up having?

> Are you assuming that there is some genetic or evolutionary reason for men to like cars? That somehow it is hard-coded into the Y chromosome to like cars?

There does seem to be some supporting evidence for this theory over social conditioning.

Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children[1]

[1]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X08...

[edit] I'm actually rather uncomfortable posting this paper as I don't feel I personally have enough expertise to draw any conclusions from it.

I'm just posting it as it seems to directly address the parent's question.

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