We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by shrimp_emoji » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #187

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% representa…

Freshman year CS: 30-40% girls

Senior year CS: 1-5% girls

Pepehands

SquadW

Tfw your lived experience won't stop redpilling you D:

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

#212

Post by btilly » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #160

btilly wrote: post #27

I know it is not politically correct to say it, but I remain unconvinced that gender parity is a desirable goal. Particularly given the current state of research into differences in gender averages. Here is a real example. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#... men have about a one standard deviation advantage in spacial reasoning over women. Assuming that both distributions are normal wi…

> Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering. This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of engineering students. Decades of hand-wringing later, women are still about 20% of engineering students. Based on spacial reasoning ability, perhaps women SHOULD be about 20% of engineering students. I just wanted to point out that this is objectively wrong for o…

I said engineering, and I meant engineering. Not computer science. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-de... to verify that in 2016, just under 21% of engineering degrees were given to women. The figures for the mid 1980s were almost the same. But if you can find figures, in the mid-1960s, engineering degrees were almost exclusively given to men.

The ratios have been fairly constant in recent decades, but vary a lot from degree to apparently related degree. For example around 40% of degrees in mathematics go to women, and that factor of 2 difference from engineering has not changed appreciably since Reagan was President.

Now you are right that women were a large part of early software development. "Computer" used to be a job that was almost exclusively held by women. Who then made the transition from actually being the ones who did the calculations to writing code. (Note, the preponderance of women can be explained by mathematical ability being fairly evenly distributed, but most careers using that ability having been barred to women historically.) See Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton for justly famous examples.

However I have noticed that the gender ratio seems to be strongly dependent upon language. Some years ago I worked on a project with a COBOL and a Perl group. The COBOL group was largely women, but Perl was almost all men. I got to see what happened in Perl up close. You had a pretty good balance of men and women getting into web development. But a lot of men went from web development to back end web development into programming. Women were more significantly likely to go to front end, design and product management. And neither I nor the women that I talked to saw discrimination as having been the driving factor.

So why does it happen? Here is my best guess. Between COBOL and more modern languages we have introduced many language features that are hard for most people to get their heads around. For example recursion, pointers, closures, and class hierarchies. These barriers are sufficiently hard that many teachers privately say that only some people are able to learn to program. My suspicion is that one or more of these concepts is more of a barrier for women than men.

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

#213

Post by ForHackernews » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #187

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% representa…

Does anyone have a goal of 50% female developers? Can we see some citations for that? Most companies I've worked at claimed to be trying for 20%, and they were failing abysmally at it.

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

#214

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #210

TeMPOraL wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misreporting the very link you quoted. Indeed, the Wikipedia description is pretty fair. I'll quote the relevant paragraph directly: "James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback.[2] The memo was written on a flight to China.[12][13] Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is e…

In terms of pipeline argument, the memo can be viewed as arguing that the pipeline is biased at every stage That's your interpretation, and isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia page nor the original memo. Both the memo and the Wikipedia page discuss the changes Damore suggested making at Google , not anything about changes in the pipeline.

> That's your interpretation, and isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia page nor the original memo.

Yes, it's my interpretation. I quoted Wikipedia to show directly (the quote is self-evident) that GP is misrepresenting the very article they're linking to, and I then followed with reinterpreting that quote through the lens of the "pipeline argument". As far as I recall the memo (I read it two years ago), Damore didn't explicitly talked about pipeline, and yes, his suggestions were entirely about what Google should and shouldn't do.

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

#215

Post by xienze » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #187

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% representa…

> 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?

Oh it can be done, it just requires reducing the number of male employees in one way or another. Everyone wants to believe the utopian ideal of perfectly-balanced ratios of employees can be achieved without someone getting the short end of the stick, but reality says otherwise.

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

#216

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

sbilstein wrote: post #53

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white g…

In my experience, making an interview less biased is not about color of skin. It's about comfort and acknowledging how these anxieties creep up. At big companies I've worked at, we coached interviewers to do at least 5 minutes of small talk and resume review, to smile, to always leave time for questions at the end, to show some amount of enthusiasm for the work the interviewee is doing. It's not about an interview fo…

Yea, I’m white and I feel I have less in common with the Ivy League Zuckerbro personality than I have with poor and working class folks like who I grew up with. When I see my interviewer has two popped collars under his Stanford sweater I can instantly feel the anxiety growing. I think to myself “the minute I open my mouth he’s going to hear the mining town and farm work coming out.” It’s more about cultural background and not about race.

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

#217

Post by baddox » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #138

baddox wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wherever you try to improve the pipeline, you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment. But that's basically just complaining that there's no quick and easy fix to your hiring problem. Well, too bad, maybe it actually is a really hard problem that you're going to have to work really hard at for a long time. If there was some relatively trivial solution like "have all hirin…

Exactly. And that's what the pipeline argument tells. Whereas the more vocal pro-diversity movements tend to assume that if you haven't fixed that problem directly and immediately, it must be your moral failing.

> Whereas the more vocal pro-diversity movements tend to assume that if you haven't fixed that problem directly and immediately, it must be your moral failing.

I don't know about that interpretation. I think a better interpretation would be that diversity advocates would say "if you haven't fixed the problem yet, you should continue to work to fix the problem, even if it takes more time and effort than you initially hoped."

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

#218

Post by purple-again » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

HeroOfAges wrote: post #202

One thing I've found very interesting is that even though the majority of software developers in an enterprise or organization are male, with the ratio being as high as 80/20, the ratio of male to female managers directly managing software developers is closer to 50/50. I would say this is evidence of bias in favor of women. edited for clarity

Doesn’t have to be bias. Could just be that a higher percentage of women in engineering are here for the big money and not for the love of spending 14 hours with their head down coding. If that’s the case you would naturally expect a significantly higher percentage of them to jump on that management pay raise when offered instead of turning it down for a pay raise.

Not in anyway stating I believe this is true or is what is happening, just offering a counter point for how it could happen with no bias on anyone’s part.

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

#219

Post by age_bronze » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

I find it extremely ironic that those opposing discrimination and racism are now the ones to view people as just statistics. The whole reason why racism and sexism is bad is because it doesn't look at people as individuals.

Behind every person who goes to an interview there's whole life, and every interviewer has so much more information about that person than just her being a female or black. Pretending that by knowing only 1 piece of information, you know they made a mistake, when they clearly have so much more information than you, calling it bias or whatever, is insult to their intelligence. Who the hell are you to know they made a mistake, when you literally know nothing except one little piece of a giant puzzle?!

It also goes for women / black people who didn't choose a career in tech. There are people behind these decisions. They have freedom and free will. You can't just pretend that they are all stupid and don't know what's good for them.

Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in the first place for this to even be a problem.

The whole diversity conversation reeks of so many self-contradictions and fighting windmills, but the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. and a deep need to excuse their failure with someone else.

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

#220

Post by hkmurakami » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

HeroOfAges wrote: post #122

majos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone who didn't read the linked article (it's short), it suggests that a key element is careful design of intro courses. Students with computer science experience get a more advanced course that is explicitly designed not to make them more competitive in second-year courses (instead, it starts on material that will re-appear in third-year courses). Students with no computer science experience get their own intr…

How does this level the playing field? Why would this not reduce the overall rate of learning for everyone to suit the needs of the slowest students?

Maria Klawe used to be the Dean of Engineering at my alma mater when I was a student there, and I distinctly remember being lost and demoralized by this exact situation of being in intro CS with classmates who grew up coding.

Some students end up in Grad level courses before finishing their undergrad careers. Some won't be on that track but will be experienced enough for a new grad job in industry. These two groups don't need to be in the same technical courses in their first year at school.