51–60 of 102 posts
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Because people who look different from people who are currently in the field they're interested in feel like they aren't welcome and won't pursue it. It's not about this generation; it's the next.
Is there any evidence of this? I hear it talked about a lot, but I have never seen anything that actually proves this is the case.
[1]] https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-coding-1...
"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if you peel back one layer, it has very little diversity of thought" as well. Why? Because the company was built to execute Steve Jobs' ideas. The more that any given executive could run an emulator of Steve Jobs' brain, the less of Jobs' time he required. "Ideas ar…
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Why do people care so much about what others look like in a field instead of doing what they're interested in? Perhaps that's the real issue at the root of all this.
Because people who look different from people who are currently in the field they're interested in feel like they aren't welcome and won't pursue it. It's not about this generation; it's the next.
If this was really a problem, then every field that was slightly skewed would only trend towards the extremes but that hasn't happened. This constant need to balance groups without any understanding that people are different just comes across as nonsense.
"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if you peel back one layer, it has very little diversity of thought" as well. Why? Because the company was built to execute Steve Jobs' ideas. The more that any given executive could run an emulator of Steve Jobs' brain, the less of Jobs' time he required. "Ideas ar…
Diversity is advertised too much those days, but in reality, it barely matters. The advocates need to further explain why it is good for the team and such. Since many companies, including my own, implementing the diversity initiative by lowering the bar for the diversity candidates, even those that are being turned down at earliest stage, still interestingly, being rescued later. However, even people take issues abou…
If this does happen at your company, there's no need to use a throwaway account.
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I understand what it means to at least estimate representation based on gender, race, religion, nationality, veteran status, etc., and from that infer possible discrimination. I can also understand the reasons for having civil rights laws to protect members of those groups, and I fully acknowledge the long history of discrimination in the US (I'm from the US) against Native Americans, blacks, women, non-heterosexuals…
> But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any meaningful way. For that to be true, you'd have to be unaware of the fact that people can process data and reason through complex problems differently. > I assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind reading devices aren't that good. That is a poor assumption that requires the redefinition of the word "thought". Our…
This was in the context of hiring, and I gave my operational definition - how does one apply 'diversity of thought' to the hiring process?
> "Here is a complex problem that can be solved in more than one way - show your work."
Presenting a solution, or an attempt at a solution, is an expression of one's thoughts.
> "diversity of thought is very useful"
How do you apply it to the hiring process? How does the proposed method (skills testing) result in improved diversity of thought?
I'll be more concrete with two examples. Example 1: Suppose there are only three schools which teach COBOL programming, and you are a bank which is looking to hire junior COBOL programmers. Do you design your test for COBOL competency, which will result in preferential selection from those small number of schools and hence reduce the diversity of thought? Or do you hire for more general diversity of thought and expect more overhead to train people in COBOL?
Example 2. Suppose you put the applicant on an Ubuntu box and ask them to write a sort program in C++ which takes two command-line arguments. The first is an input file name containing set of lines (ending with a '\n'), the second is the output file name containing the input lines but sorted by byte value.
Of those that pass the test, 50 do the 'standard' vector with a sort from the standard library, but only 10 do I/O failure checking, and 1 of the 50 decides to make the parent directories if the filename's directory doesn't already exist.
But wait, another 40 treat C++ as C, and use stdio along with a resizing array of char * . Of those, 30 use qsort, 8 implement quicksort, and 2 use bubble sort.
(Oh, and one person who didn't finish was 90% of the way through implementing a Timsort.)
That's a diversity of thought. Do you give preference to them for thinking about the problem in a different way?
But wait, another 7 think about it a bit, realize that 'sort' is on the Ubuntu box, and construct system("sort filename1 -o filename2").
That's surely thinking outside the box, so should be encouraged in the name of diversity of thought, yes?
Except another 2 think about it further, realize that the filenames may contain spaces or shell metacharacters, so construct the exec call directly. Security thinking is hard to train, so they should have preference, yes?
And finally, the last one writes a C++ program which uses the Python C API to pass in a Python program as a string.
Surely that's even more diverse thinking - and completely within the test protocol as given.
Now to reverse the direction. I know all of these solutions. If I were given the task and I know that the employee wants to hire for "diversity of thought". Which implementation should I do to improve my chances of being hired?
That is, should I do something which I know is less maintainable simply because I know it's more obscure and thus shows my diversity of thought?
I agree quotas suck. A lot. When people explain why we need them, they fall back to "it's morally good" because the other choice is "monoculture" or "racism" which is "bad" or "evil" depending on who you ask. My problem with that is that I don't accept purely moral arguments, these are usually subjective and depend on someone's culture. Additionally they easily lead to tribalization where people form two camps over a problem and neither side is willing to compromise because their tribe is good and the other is evil/bad.
A diversity of thought seems intuitively to be more effective at solving "programmer didn't think of X because they're not in group Y" problems. Diversity by skin color or gender... not so much. Atleast, it doesn't seem to be a good solution for the above problem and when it is, only for a very very narrow range of problems. It obviously doesn't mean you shouldn't hire women or people with other skin colors or ethnicity. But also that you shouldn't hire them primarly.
Hiring 50/50 male/female workers doesn't solve your ignorance of deaf or blind users of your software. Or people who lost limbs or are otherwise inhibited in movement (just look at Microsoft, their new controller is an amazing statement for diversity).
A purely blind hiring process would solve some of this. Additionally the hiring process would also have to find people that challenge the status quo at the work place, atleast in the relevant matters.
Writing an app in React? Hire someone who is good at Angular and React but advocates Angular. You'll be hearing about problems in your App you haven't thought about. Make this person satisfied with your App.
Creating "Uber but for X"? Hire people who do X and who use X and don't want X disrupted by "Uber but for X". They'll tell you all about what's wrong with the implementation. Make them satisfied.
A diverse group of people is a group that when asked about a problem will find at least as many solutions as people in the group.
Ask your team "what would the ideal calculator look like" and see what they come up with. They can make it phyiscal or software, any arrangement or features they like. But each should have their own unique calculator.
I would say this is a good start point for further thought and discussion on this, though obviously I'm reducing the complexity of such a wide, subjective and deep rooted problem.
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Picking candidates of your preferred gender/ethnicity over candidates of your non-preferred gender/ethnicity is the canonical definition of institutional discrimination. It takes a huge amount of double-think to arrive at the conclusion that this is the same as having gendered bathrooms. Any institution that prefers candidates of a particular gender/ethnicity is prejudicially discriminating against all other candidat…
Well, my point was exactly that discriminating is fine, if it means recognizing differences and providing equal opportunities (sure, that's not exactly what quotas do all the times, but it's what they are trying to do). You don't have to agree, of course. I wonder if you think that there is prejudice/discrimination that quotas are trying to fix (in a deeply flawed way, according to your view; in an imperfect but stil…
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Is there any evidence of this? I hear it talked about a lot, but I have never seen anything that actually proves this is the case.
You might find this[1] interesting. [1]] https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-coding-1...
It looks like advertisers in the 80's had a demographic they were marketing too, they didn't create one. That article start with the assumption that everyone studying a field is interested in it as opposed to wanting a career and goes downhill from there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diversity is advertised too much those days, but in reality, it barely matters. The advocates need to further explain why it is good for the team and such. Since many companies, including my own, implementing the diversity initiative by lowering the bar for the diversity candidates, even those that are being turned down at earliest stage, still interestingly, being rescued later. However, even people take issues abou…
You work at a company where minorities get praised for not having any deliverable in 6 months? Which company? If this does happen at your company, there's no need to use a throwaway account.
The company is a big one, a named one, but with some age on it. As absurd as it sounds, the candidate is hired for a hotly sought after position, that supposedly requires production ready coding skills AND battle tested machine learning skills. Yet the candidate comes with no knowledge of Python or Linux.