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Dell Autism Hiring Program

jobs.dell.com

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Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#171

Post by TheCoelacanth »

hackerman12345 wrote: post #146
aeredhel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain this whole American "affirmative action" and "special hiring practices" thing? As I understand it, when given two candidates with equal interview results, the company will choose the female instead of the male one. Am I getting it wrong?

The generic explanation is: The 'minority' can often have worse interview results and still get the job over a non-minority. There was recently in the news a lawsuit against Harvard I believe, because there is some evidence that a White or Asian (minority in US but not in schools as a lot of them attend school) student can have better admissions testing scores and a "underrepresented" minority with lower scores gets…

The Harvard lawsuit you're referring to was quite a bit more subtle than that. There was a consistent pattern of Asian applicants getting lower scores in interviews conducted by Harvard admissions officers than in the other interviews that were part of the application process while other applicants of other races got approximately the same scores from admissions officers as from other interviewers. This was taken as evidence that the admissions officers' interview scores (and thus the overall admissions decisions) were biased against Asian applicants.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#172

Post by castlecrasher2 »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #170
wrnr wrote: post #71

The way our industry treats neuro-diversity is autistic. I am very dyslexic, the other day I misspelled the word TAB as TAP when implementing an event listener in a codebase +100K lines. It took me half a day just to find this bug. At LastCo I heard the project manager and scrum master joke behind my back "we'll just have the autist with OCD do the programming" while referring to me. In their mind lacking a "theory o…

Is this necessarily a negative comment? It comes across to me as “we’ll get the person who’s really good at focusing to do the programming”. Unless it was said in a sarcastic way? I think it’s worth asking the person what they meant, if they meant it in a good way, you’ll find out, and if they meant it in a bad way, most people will be embarrassed about being asked about it, so it will put them on notice to avoid say…

I'm struggling to think of a situation when using a disorder to refer to a person is acceptable.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#173

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

m_sahaf wrote: post #147
ThrowawayP wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft has a similar program My, um, psychic powers for predicting the future tells me anybody with autism issues or even just introversion who goes there will be penalized heavily in the stack rankings (which they no longer formally do, but informally...) at performance review time for lack of "visiblity" year after year and eventually be washed out of MS as "good attrition".

It might help that Microsoft has already abandoned the stack ranking process[0]. [0] https://hbr.org/2013/11/dont-rate-your-employees-on-a-curve

It still exists for the purposes of bonus and raise distribution (“rewards”) - and while the mandatory rank-and-yank policy has been removed, there’s still pressure within management to eliminate lower-performers.

A huge problem with Microsoft’s employee evaluation system (“//connect”) is the fact it’s still self-evaluation. If you’re too honest or self-critical regardless of actual performance then you will be pseudo-ranked lower than someone who knows how to bullshit their way through self-evaluations.

Let’s just say I learned the hard way. Being (constructively) self-critical in self-evaluations was drilled into me in Catholic school and it actually really helped me in university, but no-one told me it’s career self-sabotage when you enter the workforce.

I have ASD as well.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#174

Post by jpindar »

4thaccount wrote: post #112
IshKebab wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has nothing to do with why Google+ failed. Or Allo. It's because everyone was already using Facebook and WhatsApp and those have extreme network effects, and Google+/Allo were basically the same thing just owned by a different company. You don't need to invoke autism to explain it.

I found Google+ to be great, but not nearly as many people used it. I'm not on any social network anymore though.

FYI many of the people who were an Google+ are moving to MeWe.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#175

Post by gweinberg »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #162
Sniffnoy wrote: post #74

Here's what I'm wondering: if they think this separate process is more reliable than traditional interviewing... why keep it a separate process rather than using it for everyone?

A process that corrects for biases against autistics - such as lack of eye contact - would be more accurate only for assessing autistics.

Unless you're diagnosing everyone who avoids eye contact as autistic, this is not true.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#176

Post by flyinglizard »

keanebean86 wrote: post #133
zikzak wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make little mistakes like this all the time in a massive code base. What I do is do a diff on the code to see what's changed. Much easier than hunting through. This applies any time it "should work" but does not. Also, I am sorry you have to work in an environment like that.

I mixed up l and I in my ldap function in some php code. I'm not sure if it was the framework (fat free) or something else but that function would never throw any errors or exceptions. It was maddening and took at least a day to notice. I started questioning my sanity. I never thought to just do a diff...

I’ve once had a non printable in a header file on a huge codebase (mobile phone OS and apps, pre-iPhone) :(

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#177

Post by pbowyer »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #165
zerr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note, did you consider switching to statically typed language with a good IDE?

This isn’t a bad suggestion. I make silly spelling mistakes all of the time. Especially if there are other things going on in the office. When I have to work with large JavaScript codebases I always move for TypeScript for that very reason. It won’t compile if I’ve done something like that and will happily shout the line at me that (paraphrased example): 545: someArray.srt((a: number, b: number) => a-b) - ‘srt’ does…

The good IDE is key for me (I am dyslexic too). I find Jetbrains' products to be a saviour with all the autocomplete and intellisense.

I don't have to worry if I've spelled the variable incorrectly or (more frequently) used a synonym instead of the word I first used; autocomplete catches it.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#178

Post by Sniffnoy »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #162
Sniffnoy wrote: post #74

Here's what I'm wondering: if they think this separate process is more reliable than traditional interviewing... why keep it a separate process rather than using it for everyone?

A process that corrects for biases against autistics - such as lack of eye contact - would be more accurate only for assessing autistics.

While I admit I don't know the details, it seems unlikely to me that this process works the way you seem to be supposing it works, by somehow measuring bias and then correcting that out, such that it would yield incorrect results when applied to the wrong population. My suspicion is that it's more likely that it works by using processes that don't generate as much potentially biasing -- which is to say, irrelevant information -- in the first place. In which case it's just a better, less biased process in general.

Re: Dell Autism Hiring Program

#180

Post by ThrustVectoring »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #178
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A process that corrects for biases against autistics - such as lack of eye contact - would be more accurate only for assessing autistics.

While I admit I don't know the details, it seems unlikely to me that this process works the way you seem to be supposing it works, by somehow measuring bias and then correcting that out, such that it would yield incorrect results when applied to the wrong population. My suspicion is that it's more likely that it works by using processes that don't generate as much potentially biasing -- which is to say, irrelevant in…

Information can be irrelevant for evaluating autistics and relevant for allistics, too. Especially if you give autistic employees roles or support that obviates some of their common weaknesses - you'd still care about whether non-autistic applicants have those weaknesses.
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