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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

#401

Post by belorn »

taneq wrote: post #181
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…

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…

Jumping directly to discrimination in society seems a bit hasted as an explanation for the data, since men entering the teaching profession also show the exact same data. When hitting a roadblock, men a several times more likely to quit the teaching profession than a woman hitting the same roadblock. Surely it not an issue of men knowing that they're worth something in and of themselves, competing against women in the teaching profession.

Theory should be testable. Failure rate after interview rejection should be fairly easy to gather over any number of profession, so why not do that. Rather than just studies on teaching and tech profession, lets have 20-30 different profession, about which 50% will be male dominated and 50% female dominated (should be easy since about 90% of all profession in Sweden have major gender imbalance, and >80% of both women and men are employed).

Rather than explaining the odds, and rather than talking about intrinsic value, maybe we should be talking about the psychological effect of diverging behavior. If 60% of people in a restaurant pick vanilla ice-cream as desert and 40% pick chocolate, the 40% is more likely to have buyers remorse than those in the 60%. Being in a minority, be that based on gender, race, language, or ice cream preference, will have an confidence impact. When it comes to carer choice, that impact has then a very noticeable effect.

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

#402

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cloudjacker wrote: post #167
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…

> women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men For reference, what is this saying about how many of those that stop practicing are men? 7 times more likely than what? I haven't read the article yet. Any given individual is how likely to 'stop practicing' after a rejection? 10% if man, 70% if woman? 1% if man, 7% if woman?

IIRC it's more like 10:70 than 1:7, a HNsearch should show up stories on this imbalance, have definitely read about it here.

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

#403

Post by pluma »

kolokolo wrote: post #256
balls187 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As asked elsewhere--what systemic bias exists that targets certain women (white, black, mexican), but not women of other races (particularly Chinese, Indian and Russian)? Perhaps instead, it's because schools (government?) in Russia, India, and China have emphasized Computer Science, and produce higher number of female grads. Anecdotally, I attended a tiny engineering school in the midwest, and pretty much all the gr…

TIL Russian women are not white.

Newsflash: "race" is a bullshit concept that's a leaky abstraction on top of "ethnicities" at best (which is in turn a leaky abstraction on top of genetics and ancestry).

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

#404

Post by shados »

lsc wrote: post #362
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…

the counter-argument is that when you fire someone, their co-workers, generally speaking, become at least a little uneasy (usually the level of unease is directly proportional to the level of agreement that the person getting fired wasn't good enough or otherwise had it coming, but there is still some unease even when it's obvious that it's the only way forward.) Now, you can try to get around this by a real trial pe…

you're right, people get uneasy about it, but they get really uneasy when you keep bad people.

I've seen entire companies evaporate because a bad apple stuck around, people who had to work with them quit, then more quit, and eventually the whole company was just mediocre or bad people and they couldn't run with that anymore.

Kind of the broken window problem applied to people.

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

#405

Post by shados »

flukus wrote: post #312
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…

It already happens, it's called contracting. And the results are terrible because no one gives a fuck about quality at a job the might not have in 3 months.

nah, that sucks. What I'm talking about is how Netflix does it (or at least, how Ive been told they do it).

You start working there for a premium salary and you're expected to deliver accordingly. If you don't, you get a generous severance package and politely ask to leave. And you know about that when you get hired.

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

#406

Post by jryan49 »

morgante wrote: post #222
jryan49 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When's the last time you had to modulo a number? I feel like when I was first asked this question I got hung up on that more that anything.

You don't need the modulus operator to solve FizzBuzz.

Yeah, that's true. But any standard implementation is going to use %...

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

#407

Post by pbhjpbhj »

minikites wrote: post #382
T2_t2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not. And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE. When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereot…

> they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions Oh? Which ones are those? There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men, for example. The shift happened because computer programming turned a corner and became prestigious, at which point it became "stereotypically male", and the pattern of "stereotypically male" = prestigious holds through a number of professions. Men are doctors…

>There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men //

Can you cite a good source for this.

I'm concerned it might be confusing the job called "programmer" with the role we now call programmer. AIUI in the early days of computers a "programmer" was a sort of typist that took a written program and punched the cards that allowed the program to be entered in to a computer, the technical tasks of algorithm design, program construction and such were generally not done by these same people.

That aside, I'm not sure it matters: why aren't there more female top chefs? It's certainly not because women don't like to cook. I posit that it's because in general they care less about being competitive and prefer to avoid high-stress situations.

Do you consider that testosterone is inert? It's mood and mind altering and men have lots of it. Denying the basic biological differences between the sexes is a dangerous axiom on which to attempt to create a stable and fair society.

Men, as an example, undergo hormonal changes when they become parents. These changes lead to greater tendencies towards nurturing behaviours, tendencies that female ordinarily possess by default and which make men and women naturally suitable for different societal and occupational roles. It makes a lot of sense for humans to be hormonally perturbed towards preference and ability at different roles -- why we are fighting against that rather than embracing it is well beyond my ken.

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

#408

Post by morgante »

jryan49 wrote: post #406
morgante wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need the modulus operator to solve FizzBuzz.

Yeah, that's true. But any standard implementation is going to use %...

Sure, but the important bit is that if you completely blank and forget about % (I have done so) you can still solve it easily if you're a half-decent programmer.

Not to mention that if I see a candidate is stumped on the modulus part I'll offer them % myself.

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

#409

Post by zdragnar »

avasylev wrote: post #150
DigitalSea wrote: post #130

I consider myself a competent developer, but I have no academic background as I am self-taught. While I have had a steady supply of work, because of this, I will most likely never get to work for a big company like Microsoft, Google or Facebook because I wouldn't pass their technical interview. I lack the understanding of core computer science principles and I am okay with admitting that, I don't think it makes me a…

I'm one of the people who ask those algorithm/white board questions. I've read a lot criticism on this topic, here're my reasons to stil keep asking these questions: 1) Working on algorithm problem requires very little in common between interviewer and interviewee. I'm C++/C#, I won't be able to give Ruby dev a real world task and evaluate it properly. Algo/data structure problems are universal and looks similar in a…

As a fellow engineer who also performs technical interviews, I cannot accept your first point.

Solving trivial problems does not give you any useful information about how a person solves nontrivial problems. This is especially true if you are not specifying the language the candidate needs to use.

What if I solved fizzbuzz in Haskell? It certainly would not look like a c# implementation, and you wouldn't be able to judge anything about it other than maybe it might produce a correct answer- is it idiomatic? Is it performant? Will it even compile? Technical interviews (especially when you consider candidates outside of your current language / stack) are about assessing capability and trajectory - willingness to learn and adapt. Rote memorization of objective problems that can be found online tell you nothing about how they will solve problems on the job.

As for point two, memorizing solutions to problems with objective answers isn't a terribly valuable skill; presuming that it should be a requirement without announcing it in the job requirements is certainly analogous to hazing. Unless you want a team with little to no creativity, you are selecting for candidates that do not demonstrate what you actually need- and the success of your team is in spite of your hiring process, not enabled by it.

I am sorry if this came across as either personal or exceptionally harsh, but I am pained by the amount of incredibly intelligent people who are willing to accept that suboptimal things ought to be, simply because they are.

One of the biggest contributing factors for a team's - and company's- culture is its hiring practice, and it deserves far more attention than what our industry gives it.

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

#410

Post by morgante »

golemotron wrote: post #359
morgante wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No one likes to go here but in addition to the cultural reinforcements, young men have 17x serum testosterone compared to women of the same age [1]. Avg. Adult Male 270-1,070 Avg. Adult Female 15-70 Hormones affect behavior and in this case competitiveness. [1] http://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/testostero...

That definitely plays into it. A certain amount of aggressiveness is crucial in career success (for example, men are much more willing to apply for jobs where they don't meet all the stated requirements).
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