211–220 of 449 posts
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> And so hiring decisions are done by interviewers without knowing the gender or how the candidate looks. It might make the situation worse: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
It's very sad that "free from sexist, racist, ageist biases" is considered "worse", surely? Do you agree?
I worked at Google, and Alan Eustace, Google's most emphatic champion of gender diversity when I worked there, repeatedly emphasized that Google couldn't lower its hiring bar for women candidates, because that would hurt the reputation of women already there The main forms of gender-diversity outreach that I remember Google engaging in were 1) programs for young girls, to introduce them to programming, 2) programs fo…
Wouldn't it violate US equal-opportunity laws to lower the hiring bar for women?
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I hear you when you say,"the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR platitude. If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and worked with enough people to know that…
All fair criticisms. I'm not a hiring manager and my experience with hiring processes is limited. What I had in mind is the mandate of hiring the best person for the job and any/all other policies are designed with that directive in mind. This is analogous to how the court system is supposed to be designed to be the discoverer of truth and the entire legal process as it relates to court proceedings is to further that…
Also, fwiw, that process sounds like it would be pretty good at filtering candidates to be good at the job, but broad categories like "communication skills" cover an awful lot of territory. Imagine someone from quite a different culture with wildly different (but effective within their culture) communication styles that people in your company thought was weird. That person would probably be barred from working and integrating into the corporate culture.
I'm not saying you guys are bad people, or that I would have the guts to make that call myself, but I just want to point out that process as a fig leaf for distilling conformity is just that.
Could @dang or some other moderator shed some light on why these specific posts are disapearing from the front page so fast? Because this seems like a failure of the ranking algorithm.
One of the reasons I push for very objective, fixed, and carefully selected technical interview techniques is precisely to avoid these issues. The goal is to reach a point where either you pass the technical, or you don't. But making a fair technical assessment for levels and roles in a company takes time and is very tempting (but, I argue, futile) to contract out. I think in a larger context: the "pipeline problem"…
Any pointers to specifics or resources on this?
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>, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. Fascinating how different readers take away different salient points. For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work . This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the wo…
Yes. A lower-quality 'Diversity hire' just to fulfil quotas are not how you achieve equality. But... > there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton. ...it's funny how you point to two quite exceptional people as the standard for women to meet.
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> They generally like to geek out, look weird, look smart or whatever. Playing off this, I think pop culture deserves more blame than it gets for the lack of women in tech. A software engineer is more likely to enjoy ComicCon than than the average person, but actually working in software is pretty normal. In the previous decade or two, some TV shows have been casting women as the "tech genius" quite a bit. That's goo…
Could you list some of the "tech genius" characters you have in mind? I don't watch that much TV, but Abby (sp?) from NCIS springs to mind, slightly quirky, but v. intelligent, commanding. The equivalent character in Alias, f.e., was (in early series at least) a one-dimensional dork.
A truly revolutionary idea in this era of authoritarian social justice causes.
Generic ideological tangents never lead anywhere interesting and pretty much guarantee contentless flamewars, so please don't take HN threads in such directions. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010185 and marked it off-topic.
Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak. It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year…
> the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place. Please do not mislabel opinion as fact. You do both yourself and the world a disservice.
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No, you're relying on a false dichotomy here. The logic in your post suggests that if I believe it's unreasonable to expect gender parity at Google, I must also believe that the current gender distribution at Google is OK. That doesn't follow logically.
The downvotes here indicate logic doesn't always follow where there exists polarity in a belief of "truths". While you may be correct in your assertions, you will still lose the argument because it's not what people want to hear. My own downvotes aside (within 30 seconds, no less) is the point is that some topics become "logically lodged" in a jam and cannot be freed by open discourse.