But doesn't this fall into economics? It could be that they are just biased, but giving them benefit of the doubt, they might have done the math and said "nope the cost to make the recruiting effort to these schools are not worth it"
If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
411–420 of 496 posts
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#412This issue is most particularly in India. Here most tech companies even post job ads which specify tier 1 college degree as requirement
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
The underlying assumption is that, if you average over a large enough population, there should be no underlying consistent difference between subsets selected on gender, race, or class, so a difference of outcome is presumed to be a result of difference of opportunity. The underlying assumption is definitely an assumption, but it seems like a good zeroth-order assumption to me.
An especially good assumption given that assuming otherwise has been proven wrong time and time again. Pretty much every advance for women was argued against on the basis that women were somehow not biologically capable. That argument has been consistently wrong since women's suffrage, but that doesn't stop chowderheads from hauling it out anew, apparently unaware of its rich history of failure.
Except this isn't true; there are many cases where inequality of outcome is not a cause of inequality of opportunity - unless you're telling me the system actively encourages men to die on the job - so much so that 93% of all occupational deaths are male.[0]
CollegeBoard testing statistics demonstrate that in high school, 2-3 times as many boys take the AP Calculus BC, AP Physics, AP Computer Science exam than girls.[1][2]
And as you probably know, AP exams don't discriminate against gender or race - they just need you to pay the testing fee (or the reduced fee if you qualify).
UC Berkeley's EECS major has a department ratio of 4:1 M/F across all 4 class years (CalAnswers - any alumni can check this if they don't believe me), and because of California law the UC system is not allowed to consider gender as part of admissions.[3]
Differences in gender makeup of engineering and computer science come down to fewer girls choosing to pursue the field, and not because the system is inherently biased.
Given these factors, if we are seeing 50/50 gender outcomes in tech at this moment in time, it is the result of a system that undermines the meritocracy by discriminating against males.
[0]https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0006.pdf [1]https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/re... [2]http://i.imgur.com/ZalZhtF.png [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_209
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased" because bias goes both directions. In fact almost all universities go out of their way to get women into their tech programs. I think what you're talking about is trying to find a candidate pool that is more biased towards minorities than average, which is fine, but let's use the correct language. Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a…
> We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased Fine--we want more women. Research, and personal experience, shows gender-mixed teams outperform [1][2][3][4]. This is a business, not HR, decision. We also want more cultural diversity. I don't like pitching in Latin America or the Middle East with zero cultural context on the home team. If you're a B2C company, you probably want socioeconomic diversity on…
If it's a business decision to hire more females, then who are we to demand top tech companies expand their college search range?
Could it not be a business decision to minimize risk?
(I, for one, am in favor of getting rid of all diversity quotas. Companies should be allowed to hire 100% black LGBT disabled women as much as they should be allowed to hire majority males out of elite universities.)
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t mean explicitly. Small team group work and revision sessions with the TA might be sufficient. Non tier 1 schools don’t have this luxury.
I went to a top 5 school.. sorry to say there is no secret sauce the school gave us, no interview prep classes, and not a lot of TA sessions either - at least not with small sizes. Definitely nothing at all targeted towards interviews - even the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you ho…
>the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.
This was very much my experience as well. A couple classes had "make your own final project!" things that usually encouraged front-end like an app or a website. I bombed those pretty hard because I had no idea what I was doing.
Most of my classes only touched code occasionally for a homework. Everything else was either math, short answer, or running algorithms by hand.
I don't know how all this compares to other schools, but it could be a massive advantage in interviews. Most interviews are asking you to come up with an algorithm and implement it. I can't tell you how many interviews have come down to the "linked list indexed by a dictionary" data structure that I had to figure out for my first CS midterm. Nobody asks about logging stacks or Oauth2 or caching in new-grad interviews.
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are matching the diversity of the schools' recruiting efforts. So yes, you could say they are (perhaps) unbiased vs their input, but their input has problems. In other words, their selection of schools to recruit from means they are outsourcing the distribution of your their candidate pool, and the GP poster is not happy with that aspect of the result. If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you t…
It is matching society, however: CollegeBoard testing statistics reveal that in high school girls take AP Computer Science much less frequently than boys - at proportions fairly close to 1:3. Given that anyone is free to take an AP exam provided they can spend $100, the only plausible explanation is that fewer girls choose to pursue computer science as a major. Alternatively, you could suggest that there is nationwid…
> Given that anyone is free to take an AP exam provided they can spend $100, it seems to be down to individual choice.
In which world is it "individual choice" for a 14-18 year old to pay $100 per exam to take an exam?
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#417Everyone resents these guys. I don’t blame you. There’s some serious hatred from ivy leaguers. Serious hatred.
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
"there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent." I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools"…
I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". Any school lower on the perceived status hierarchy than the school they went to, most likely.
All this talk of tiered schools is gross
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
"there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent." I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools"…
> or all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet. > The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then…
Pretty awful perspective.
Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools
#420This is a good idea in theory, but the problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent. I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State - your…
I'm not sure I understand your argument here. If we cut through the clutter, you're essentially advocating that you hire people on an individual basis and shouldn't weight at all what school they come from. No?
Your name.. pretty messed up.