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Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

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Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#461

Post by direfungasaur »

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #403
direfungasaur wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

obvious and unobjectionable steps like "recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grads I don't follow how this is an obvious decision. Would you please elaborate? If the target software isn't dealing with the biology domain, why would I prefer biology grads over computer science grads? It seems like the lack of formal knowledge around CS fundamentals could prove a hindrance, while the biology knowledge wouldn't…

The vast majority of jobs now are not 'low-level hardware, highly algorithmic or heavy in the domain modeling space'. They're corporate CRUD-style apps, existing software maintenance, and other such things. There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit for these sorts of things if they have some contact with a computer science class or two.

There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit for these sorts of things if they have some contact with a computer science class or two.

Sure, it's completely realistic for a biology student (or any other discipline) to serve in a junior or line developer position in many corporate environments. If you're just wiring Spring beans together, writing test cases, or doing basic sysadmin work there's not much CS doing on.

My experience is that the differences show as you become more senior or you want to do things off the beaten path. Once you start dealing with comprehensive troubleshooting (back-to-front), non-trivial data modeling, and architecture the lack of fundamentals starts to slow you down. Understanding a DAG is pretty important in certain cases, and if you weren't exposed to it that's alot of outside learning. It's doable, but you have to put in more and more personal time to keep up. Whereas the CS folks are building on at least passing knowledge over four years of study.

To put my biases on the table, I'm a self-taught dev that went back for my BS degree. I have strong bias towards the value of a CS education.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#462

Post by morgtheborg »

rsj_hn wrote: post #325
humanrebar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is. Well, it attempts to be utilitarian. However, there are routinely articles on HN, from the perspective of the prospect and the company, about how much of a crapshoot interviewing for coding is.

Yes, it's a crapshoot. There can be bad hiring decisions. There can be bad business decisions. And people can be jerks or rude. People are passed over promotions. That happens all the time to everyone. But it's problematic when someone sees each event as happening to them as some conspiracy against their race/gender/age/whatever, as opposed to someone just disagreeing with them or dismissing their argument because th…

I often think the bias occurs before the interview in terms of the pipeline. For me, that's my largest self-correcting area. There are groups of people or people who present themselves in a certain way that I simply don't want to interview because it feels like 'wasting my time'. Clearly that's bullshit and I make an active effort to overcome those biases and, if anything, now am overcorrecting (a better mistake to make imo). Once they're in the room, you're outline seems like a solid way to measure they're abilities.

Of course I'm not saying there isn't opportunity for bias here as well (mainly in the selection of the question), but you've offset it magnificently by having written down the correct answer and (hopefully) prioritizing getting said answer rather than the manner in which it was conveyed ("I think..", questions rather than statements ("It's x, right?"), "Maybe it's..", etc. since those types of self-effacing comments are often seen and presented as polite forms of communicating for women).

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#463

Post by tomschlick »

arkades wrote: post #457
tomschlick wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thats straight negligence by her legal team.

"I didn't have time to go through..." She had to have done this without her attorneys. Big Firms bill by the hour: if you have the money to throw at them, they will find the man-hours to get the job done. "We don't have the time" just isn't a phrase they use.

Unless her team's strategy was to bury opposing council in documents hoping they wouldn't be able to search through them all in time.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#464

Post by xenadu02 »

0xbear wrote: post #442
sdenton4 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a piece in response to the damore memo, written up by an evolutionary biologist. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... It spends a while at the beginning on credentials and the importance of using citations (something damore failed at), and starts getting into the science at 'universal across all cultures, are we sure?'

Damore didn't fail at providing citations. You did apparently fail at reading the original document, however. References were deliberately stripped out by Gizmodo, and then republished by everyone else.

Please don't do this. There have been many take-downs of his full document (that include the so-called citations).

The one legit paper he linked to (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173...) didn't reach the conclusion he was claiming. That paper demonstrates that in egalitarian developed societies men are less oppressed by other men, not that there are innate differences. In all cases women's behavior is the result of being oppressed to a greater or lesser degree. In other words in less developed societies many men are just as oppressed by the powerful as women and use the same coping strategies.

He also failed to address the fact that interest doesn't necessarily correlate with ability. Research shows men and women don't differ in empathy unless men know they are being judged, which suggests it is a culturally-imposed trait and definitely not universal.

He makes a lot of assumptions without bothering to explain them, eg: assuming effective meritocracy and blindly ignoring his own caveats, never resolving the conflict with his own arguments. He never once presents ANY evidence that cognitive differences between men/women influence performance in software engineering.

Here are just a few papers: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-11115-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01642-012 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2000.... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9450.1963.... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3438111 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10666324 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-p... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951011/

There are plenty of books and articles on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troubleso... https://sites.google.com/site/dianehalperncmc/books/sex-diff... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/brains-men-and-women-... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/science/monogamys-boost-to... https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-struggle-for-equality-a-fight-... https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/sexual-body-size-... http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-div...

One interesting result is if you can get women to picture themselves as men most of the cases where we do see differences disappears, again suggesting the vast majority of differences are cultural: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...

Honestly it doesn't take much effort to stop with the confirmation bias. Do some actual research on your own and don't just look for sources that reinforce your existing biases.

James Damore wrote a document mostly describing his feelings and sprinkled in a few footnotes to make it look like he had done some research. He is woefully out of date with the current research (because he obviously didn't do any). That's pretty much what everyone does regarding this topic, both on HN and elsewhere.

It has become a demoralizing slog to repeatedly attempt to educate people when they are both a) so ignorant on a topic and b) so absolutely certain they are correct despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I suppose this issue falls into the category of things that "everyone knows" so people Dunning-Kruger themselves into a position without giving it any thought.

The question of whether there are biological differences that make men and women suited for different tasks has been studied for decades. There are mountains of data. Brilliant men and women have written extensively on the topic. For the love of God, please take the time to educate yourself.

Even if you want to cling to the idea that women aren't as suited to programming (despite the evidence to the contrary) you could at least avoid doing an incompetent job by being aware of the research in the field.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#465

Post by sigmar »

0xbear wrote: post #442
sdenton4 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a piece in response to the damore memo, written up by an evolutionary biologist. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... It spends a while at the beginning on credentials and the importance of using citations (something damore failed at), and starts getting into the science at 'universal across all cultures, are we sure?'

Damore didn't fail at providing citations. You did apparently fail at reading the original document, however. References were deliberately stripped out by Gizmodo, and then republished by everyone else.

>Damore didn't fail at providing citations. You did apparently fail at reading the original document, however.

Maybe read the medium post he linked to? (The irony of your comment is killing me). If Wikipedia, The Atlantic, and the NY Post appear as citations more than primary literature, it is absolutely a failure to cite (as described in the medium post).

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#466

Post by chaostheory »

Joeri wrote: post #233
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue it's not about "in tech" though, as another commenter pointed out, this is a completely different world of private jets and deciding where to spend the hundreds of millions these people have on, betting on their 10 million investment becoming a billion. This is the "snorting coke off a model's ass for lunch" world, not tech.

Does the distinction matter? Are you saying this sort of behavior does not reach the level of concern inside of the world of tech, regardless of how that is defined?

It's definitely a concern in tech and there are definitely problems to fix. However it's just that tech's problems with this type of behavior pales in comparison to finance's problems with it (as well as others such as Hollywood and the music industry). This whole article is about finance; about a financial firm that happens to specialize in investing in the tech sector. It's unfair to pin this one entirely on us when it's not even really our industry but the people financing us.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#467

Post by aianus »

crdoconnor wrote: post #456
aianus wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American is not a race so it's not racist, no. But I do feel that it's wrong to restrict the supply of foreign programmers so that an engineer in Silicon Valley can earn $200k instead of 'only' $150k. The average SV programmer is already in the global 0.1%, they don't need protectionism.

>But I do feel that it's wrong to restrict the supply of foreign programmers so that an engineer in Silicon Valley can earn $200k instead of 'only' $150k. Do you feel that Yelp paying $200k rather than $150k is a greater injustice than poorer countries footing the bill for educating their best and brightest only to see their best and brightest flee to San Francisco because domestic companies cannot compete with 'only…

The injustice is not (just) Yelp paying $200k instead of $150k, it's an engineer in India with the same skillset earning $30k. Or any number of projects not being undertaken at all because the return is less than $200k.

I don't know what the solution to education financing would be in this scenario; perhaps something like Singapore's Tuition Grant Agreement obligating students to stay in-country or pay a big penalty to leave.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#468

Post by ebfd »

sangnoir wrote: post #397
adekok wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. To play devils advocate, sexism is a thing everywhere . In some cases, there are good biological reasons why men and women are treated differently, e.g. child care (mostly women) versus hard physical labor (mostly men) Where those biological differences aren't effective (e.g. typing on a keyboard), then yes, men and women should be treated the same. But even with…

Counter devils advocate - let me remap what you're saying to race: >> racism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. >To play devils advocate, racism is a thing everywhere. In some cases, there are good biological reasons why blacks and whites are treated differently, e.g. basketball (mostly blacks) versus swimming (mostly whites ) If the above doesn't sound insane to you, I don't know what to tell you.

Sorry, can you elaborate? Why is it a problem that there are more black people in basketball?

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#469

Post by khazhoux »

Now that I've read her own account, I have the same impression I got years ago: maybe, in addition to an environment of harassment, she wasn't actually that good at being a VC.

She recounts the Flipboard incident -- she spotted a good deal early and was shot down, and then others took (a worse) deal for themselves. So... yeah, they ignored and steamrolled the junior partner. Cutthroat and not nice, but it's not shocking behavior unless there's evidence that this only occurred with her or with other female partners. Short of that, I'm willing to believe that this is a full-contact sport, since there's million$ on the line.

So I'm left with two takeaways:

- KP has/had a big problem with partners like Amit, and their tolerance of it.

- Ellen herself was likely not a top performer, but she fails to recognize that.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#470

Post by 0xbear »

xenadu02 wrote: post #464
0xbear wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damore didn't fail at providing citations. You did apparently fail at reading the original document, however. References were deliberately stripped out by Gizmodo, and then republished by everyone else.

Please don't do this. There have been many take-downs of his full document (that include the so-called citations). The one legit paper he linked to ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173... ) didn't reach the conclusion he was claiming. That paper demonstrates that in egalitarian developed societies men are less oppressed by other men, not that there are innate differences. In all cases women'…

There have been many opinions in favor of it as well, many from psychologists. So I too suggest you take the time to educate yourself of that part of the opinion spectrum.
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