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We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

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Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#181

Post by sdnlafkjh34rw »

billti wrote: post #157
sdnlafkjh34rw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India, your major is largely determine by your academic results and social pressure when you finish up secondary schools. If you score at the top in your entrance exams, you will applying to medical or engineering schools. The good schools are hyper selective and only take the top scorers (at a rate more selective than our ivy's). Very, very few people consider majors outside of these areas. Secondly, there is a h…

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response. On its face that seems plausible. I wonder if gender bias still kicks in once in career. I seem to see way less than 35% Indian women vs men in very senior or management roles. (Just my anecdotal data point of one, I don't have any numbers to back that up).

That's probably the case, but I believe it's a slightly different issue. I'd assume it's harder to break into management as a women because:

1) women entered the field later than men (so the distribution on the experienced end is less) 2) women have a significantly higher societal expectation to be the caretaker. Many pause or stop their careers when they have kids. 3) Indian society is heavily patriarchal

Regardless, I personally think the situation is better in India. It's pretty hard for the US to improve if not enough women enter the field in college. If the bottom of your funnel is weak, all the efforts on managing the middle and end are largely fruitless. We (Americans) need to take a better look at how our education and culture is causing the gap at the university level. I think that some of the approaches Harvey Mudd has taken is something we need to implement across universities.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#182

Post by sakoht »

The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won't lose female talent you find later when they refuse to join a team of all guys. But you have to be careful too, to not hire someone just because they fit a social profile you want more of on the team. Talented women don't want to be on a team where all of the women there were "tossed a softball". It's not only condescending, but it fosters the bias it intends to combat. Whoever is at fault, it is that there is a gender imbalance is worthy of debate. But addressing it is best viewed as opportunity, not an act of charity, if seen through the right lens.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#183

Post by pksdjfikkkkdsff »

rofo1 wrote: post #33

I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Be it women, or black, or whatever. Why? Why can't you just hire the right person for the job? To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups of people. Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn't make sense, that's not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end up doing i…

It's abuse of statistics to fabricate a nonexistent problem. People do it because it works so well and is so easy. Everybody wants to help women and "marginalized groups". So with some superficial, misleading statistics, you can attract attention, money and hiring advantages. Why wouldn't people do it? (I mean campaigning for those parity goals. Why companies chose to try to comply is probably simply PR, and the hope to be able to hire cheaper developers).

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#184

Post by shadowgovt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #31
stormbrew wrote: post #16

I don't think the point of criticizing "it's a pipeline problem" is that there isn't a pipeline problem, but that it's an easy out to avoid taking action at whatever stage of the 'pipeline' you happen to be working at. If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say "it's a pipeline problem" you're probably saying that there aren't enough candidates because not enough women graduate from ST programs. If you're a program develo…

And the point of criticizing the criticism of "it's a pipeline problem" is that, wherever you try to improve the pipeline, you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment. Working near the end of the pipe, you'll quickly hit diminishing returns. If the input at your segment is biased 4:1, then you can't improve past it. Sure, if your output is 8:1 then it's bad, but you won't g…

> you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment

Not in the short-run. But the reason working on the pipeline is valuable is that discrimination includes negative feedback loops. When people who would be entering the pipeline look for role models and success stories and don't find any, they're discouraged from trying. So while there are of course diminishing returns in investing in a dry pipe, if one is interested in changing the status quo, it's valuable to keep the investment a bit above the break-even point to encourage flow upstream (flow that, one must remember, will take half a decade or so to show up as a pipeline increase, depending on how long you measure the pipe to be).

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#185

Post by rb808 »

peruvian wrote: post #151
rb808 wrote: post #128

Honestly for young children I wouldn't want any of the girls to become software engineers. Most Software Engineers including myself are friendly but also grumpy, nerdy and annoying, with poor communication skills and an unhealthy lifestyle. For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment - esp one without developers in it.…

Seems like you're projecting or even self-hating. > For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment Also what does this even mean?

> even self-hating.

Lol yeah, and my team. :)

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#186

Post by bcrosby95 »

ryandrake wrote: post #177
sokoloff wrote: post #62

Is the right thing to assume we should target 50-50 gender representation as a first-principle outcome target in all fields? If so, it’s a negative sign that the marquee companies analyzed hired at about the gender split of universities they targeted. Is it equally plausible that we should be looking bottoms-up from the perspective of a fresh college graduate entering the field and asking the question, “am I likely t…

I’ve got a bunch of hobbies and none of them are even close to gender parity. Go check out poker rooms in Vegas and find me a single table where the players are 50-50 men-women. Visit flying clubs, carpentry groups, engine mechanics shops, you won’t find gender parity in any of these. And nobody is really tackling any of these as some urgent problem to solve. Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-profe…

It's all about the money. People care about professions because "female" professions tend to be paid less than "male" ones.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#187

Post by supernova87a »

With such politically charged issues, it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible.

If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representation?

A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them. Look at these percentages and you can see unsentimentally that this must be true.

Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints? If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#188

Post by gen220 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #116
hinkley wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and for me the happy ratio is around a 90:10 split. There is a time and place for really sophisticated code, and people will just have to expend some effort to understand its behavior at least, if not in fact how it accomplishes it. If that's leaking throughout the system then it's likely a code smell. I'd like to reiterate that the statement you quoted was made in the active voice. It's a process. As you add th…

Thank you for elaborating. What you wrote resonates very strongly, it's essentially the way it's been in every job I worked on. Hell, I'm guilty of it myself - once I have my own fiefdom in the codebase, I feel terrified of letting someone else work in it. In my mind, I have the vision of them struggling unproductively because they lack the knowledge about all the tiny little idiosyncrasies, of various design decisio…

I feel like a step towards a solution to this problem (which I likewise observe), is to document these idiosyncrasies in the code. My rule of thumb is that when I write or read weird code that's necessarily weird (to avoid idiosyncrasies in downstream/upstream systems), I try to add a very concise clarifying comment that acknowledges the code as weird, and points in the direction of both the problem we're avoiding and some potential solutions to make the code less weird in the future.

For example, when reading an old codebase, if I invest 20 minutes in determining why the code differs from the documentation, I add a comment saying `NOTE(gen220): the code does not match the comment. The reason appears to be X. We might resolve this with Y or Z`. That, or update one of either the code or the comment, whichever makes the most sense in the situation.

That way, a new team member (or myself, but 2 years older) won't have to stumble in the same places, and are empowered to take a stab at fixing the problem, which has been documented for them.

Personally, when my idiosyncrasies are so-documented, I feel much safer handing things off.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#189

Post by shadowgovt »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #168
16bytes wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damore wasn't fired because he argued that the pipeline shortages largely explain gender disparity, he was fired because he made women felt excluded and othered. He wasn't fired because he argued against diversity, he was fired because he threatened inclusivity. To quote: "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these diff…

That Sundar's quote is weird and it does a similar population sleight of hand. The "group of our colleagues" is already a subset of population selected for relevant skill (by virtue of having been hired by Google), so it's out of scope of Damore's memo.

I believe both Sundar's note and Damore's original memo were in the context of people hired by Google.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#190

Post by JoeAltmaier »

abjKT26nO8 wrote: post #148
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicion is that the pipeline has fewer women, partly because they leave Engineering so quickly. Thus there are hardly any experienced women in the pipeline. Since an Engineer may change jobs half a dozen times over a career, but women generally change once (to non-Engineering job) we have a cumulative effect.

> Since an Engineer may change jobs half a dozen times over a career, but women generally change once (to non-Engineering job) we have a cumulative effect. I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying that women generally have one engineering job and then they change to a non-engineering one? If not, where is the number difference coming from? Off-topic: why do you capitalize "engineering"?

Even if there were equal numbers of women and men starting out in engineering, but women never 'recycle', then the flows would be different. That's all.

I capitalize Engineer as an occupation, like Doctor Smith. Yeah, probably don't want to capitalize it as an adjective.

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