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

If it culture has a major impact, it should be fairly testable. Any differences, after correlated to gender distribution in the work force, should hint to it.

Theories that can be tested to either be false or true is always valuable in this kind of discussions.

> Your comment I responded to asked for a contrary assertion.

No. No it did not. I asked oldmanjay if, having falsely criticized me for asserting things with evidence, he wanted to make a contrary assertion with evidence. This was a rhetorical device to draw an interlocutor out.

I neither asked for nor wanted an Internet random to offer half-baked, unevidenced pro-racist, pro-sexist waffle, thanks.

> I really think it's helpful for people in your position to be exposed to an alternative view.

Yes, because I never before would have encountered people justifying the status quo by suggesting that racism and sexism don't exist or, if they do, are in fact optimum. Surely, there is nowhere else on the internet I might have been exposed to an "alternate" view. I'm sure nobody on HN has ever taken that position, let alone in response to me. Gosh, thank you for bringing something new into the world.

> but it's not prudent to say politically incorrect things on an account linked to your real identity

My, aren't you the brave one. As we see in the US elections your opinions are indeed politically correct for a notable portion of the American electorate. They have been politically correct for most of American history.

What you're unwilling to do is to have a lot of people, the people you'd rather hang out with, think you an asshole. You lack the courage of your convictions. So instead of being openly pro-racism and pro-sexism, you'll do it quietly. Hoping, I presume, for the moment that the gang in white sheets get enough power that you can finally be "honest".

If you want me to take you seriously, own your words. The internet and HN have a custom of offering a free hood dispenser to anybody wanting to comment. But that you only feel comfortable opining from under a white hood should tell you something. It certainly tells me something.

To address the last point, there's a tradeoff, as always. There's two competing forces with a hash function: speed and distribution. We want the hash to compute as quickly as possible, but want as close to equal probability of each bucket being chosen.

Assuming you're looking for a 32-bit hash value, my lazy whiteboard hash function would probably be something like:

- for strings, xor the bytes a word at a time.

- for ints, just use the 32-bit value

- for objects, let them provide their own, and if none is provided just use their memory address (this assumes that the objects don't have equality operators... that gets more complicated. If an object implements an equality operator, it also needs to implement a hash operator.)

These rules are by no means optimal, but they'd probably do as good enough for something that's not super high performance.

It also bears keeping in mind, I learned C twenty years ago, at the tender age of 12. Self-taught from the book that came with the compiler floppy[1]. We wouldn't have Internet at home for another 2 years, so I would occasionally persuade my parents to take me to a local Internet cafe for an hour to slurp up as much as I could at 28.8kbps and scribble it down. Bit manipulation operators are pretty deep in my soul at this point.

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So going back to the original discussion... that came pretty natural to me. "How would I implement a hash function?" The brain whirrs a little bit and says "hey, here's some things to think about". I am 100% aware that this isn't typical, and do not expect others to have the same experience.

In fact, if I were hiring someone, I would be totally satisfied with an answer of "I'm not sure how to implement a hash function off the top of my head. It takes the object/value that we're going to insert into the hash table and turns it into a number that we can use to index into the appropriate bucket. Can we look one up?"

Hell, I'd probably be satisfied with "Here's when I'd use a hash table, and here's when I'd use an array. I've never implemented a hash table but I'd love to know how it works under the hood."

For me when hiring, the two biggest things I'm looking for are the ability to decompose problems into manageable parts, and a curiosity about how everything works. Those two things together tend to make any other knowledge gaps totally manageable; I'm not omniscient, but my desire to learn as much as I can about anything I don't understand can sometimes give off that illusion :P.

[1] http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm

I don't think that it violates any of those, but on the otherhand your post does violate the rules for comments.

I was trying to make a point relevant to the OP, that 'diversity consultancy' is a job title comparable to 'snake oil salesman'

"I could too just have requested citation from the parent comment and be done"

Been done with what? Yes, I know, sometimes people say "citation please" as a way of refuting without reasoning, but other times, people are actually interested in reading the citation. This is one of those cases.

Furthermore, this is not one of those cases would something could be easily established through a quick google search, this sounds like a very specific study.