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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

#281

Post by EliRivers »

age_bronze wrote: post #245
TimTheTinker wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. Unfortunately, that describes human nature in general.

I've gotten used to the reeking smell of envy all my life. I was always encouraged by everyone to 'still be nice to them', to try to appease them, etc. It never, ever, and will never, work. I've had enough of that and decided and realized that the best way to deal with envy, is to stick it to them. Hit them as hard as you can with the reality. Even when it hurts them. Hurt them with the facts of how much you're bette…

I saw this going differently, in my mind. In my mind, when I started reading this comment, you were the envious one.

When I finished reading the comment, you still are, but with layers and ironies. Much less healthy layers.

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

#282

Post by hnick »

supernova87a wrote: post #252
hnick wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with you, but such smart and resourceful companies could do something about it. They are not powerless. Companies used to train internally - watch an older TV show (or even something like Better Call Saul) and see how many characters "worked their way up from the mail room". The death of company loyalty goes both ways but I'm sure it can be mended with some effort. Where I work one of the better pro…

Sure, but the scope of what most companies are concerned with is their hiring goals for the next 1-2 years (let's be generous and say 5 years). What you're talking about clearly falls into the pipeline problem and just further supports the premise -- something like a 20 year timescale issue. Which goes to the truth of this article -- this problem is far beyond the power (or responsibility) of any company. I'm not say…

The article says to not rely on proxies like college degrees, so I was aiming more along those lines. As far as I can tell (I admit I skimmed it) they advocate hiring for skills over pedigree.

There's a pipeline problem if you are only taking a specific output and society is not producing it. As an individual company then you can either broaden what you accept (and I don't think this will lower quality, but it will make hiring harder), or take charge and extend the pipeline in your own backyard through training or probationary periods to trial someone.

FTA: > As you can see, broadening your pipeline isn’t a magic pill, and as long as demand for software engineers continues to grow, it’s still going to be really hard, systemic changes to our society notwithstanding. If we do make these changes, however, the tech industry as a whole can accelerate its path toward gender parity and potentially get there within a decade.

There's probably a feedback loop here where if they can broaden their intake, it will help accelerate societal change. The largest companies will have the most trouble, because they have the most seats to fill, but they also have the resources to try something different to fix this if they really want to.

On your last point, I think having a hard target like 50% can be damaging since it is demoralising to look at the gap and it might all feel like too much to deal with. I'd personally prefer to work towards 'a bit better than last year' with some achievable (non-startup) growth rates.

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

#283

Post by JimboOmega »

age_bronze wrote: post #219

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 know…

This whole thing is ignorant to the point of being offensive.

> 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.

I have felt this very acutely and it's offensive to assume I'm sexist just because I don't see people like me at the higher levels of the org, and struggle to figure out how to balance my identity with what the org wants as a result.

Women can have male role models, but it's not the same - there are behavioral expectations of men and women that are just different. A woman can't simply "act like a man" and get the same response, and saying that's a perfectly fine solution is quite ignorant. In any case you shouldn't have to give up your identity when that has nothing to do with what actually gets the work done.

When you enter a new workplace and realize that there is nobody like you there - especially in the higher ranks - you are fighting a very difficult battle. You aren't sure what behaviors get rewarded and which get you attacked. You get left out of the little friend groups and other opportunities for connection, and you feel like an outsider.

It's not about envy at all. It's about feeling seen, about feeling accepted and like you belong in the workplace. It's about getting the group that can do the best job, and that often means a diverse team, not a homogenous one.

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

#284

Post by zanny »

sakoht wrote: post #182

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…

The irony of this thinking is that if you do the whole "teams must be gender balanced" routine early on where you are getting the 5-1 or worse ratio of men to women applying for a software position you can often be the one passing over way more talent than the company with the toxic white-male dominated culture lacking diversity. If men and women are equally good at the job (and in programming there is no reason to think otherwise) and you have 1,000 men and 200 women applying and there is a uniform distribution of talent there are going to be 200 men and 40 women in the top quintile, and if you are hiring 200 overall that means you are passing over 100 top tier men for 40 second and 20 third tier women. And by trying to discriminate to correct discrimination you leave the ~66 men you would have on average hired instead if you went purely based off choosing the "best" candidates for the job in the same position as minorities historically rejected from work due to the inverse bias - they get declined from the position because of facets of their being they have no control over, not on their own merit for the job.

Avoiding bias in hiring can never be as hamfisted as "hire equal numbers of X always" without causing a ton of harm in the process. Especially when you start trying to always hire an equal number of men and women, every ethnicity, every religion, every spoken language, every sexual orientation, every country of origin, etc. There has to be a balance between being inhospitable to diversity and using discrimination to force arbitrary amounts of diversity.

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

#285

Post by jodrellblank »

age_bronze wrote: post #245
TimTheTinker wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the defining feature is envy. envy for people who succeeded. Unfortunately, that describes human nature in general.

I've gotten used to the reeking smell of envy all my life. I was always encouraged by everyone to 'still be nice to them', to try to appease them, etc. It never, ever, and will never, work. I've had enough of that and decided and realized that the best way to deal with envy, is to stick it to them. Hit them as hard as you can with the reality. Even when it hurts them. Hurt them with the facts of how much you're bette…

Or how about they hit you with the reality that most of success is luck? https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...

> In general [in the simulation], mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.

But hey, even if you are literally Superman, we all love Superman because he goes around boasting how great he is and how much everyone else sucks, right?

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

#286

Post by belorn »

age_bronze wrote: post #219

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 know…

Carl Sagan wrote in his book The Demon-Haunted World about a kind of intellectual laziness.

"instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes. This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human"

He talked about the issue of stereotyping in science and the harm this caused his field, but it can really be seen as an insight in why people so easy start to do it once the culture makes it acceptable. It is easier. It does save the trouble of thinking. Looking at people as individuals is hard, takes energy and is prone to come back and bite you. Much easier to just reduce people to single bits of information and follow what ever the cultural accepted stereotyping (ie discrimination) that the environment allow.

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

#287

Post by hnick »

pksdjfikkkkdsff wrote: post #259
hnick wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with you, but such smart and resourceful companies could do something about it. They are not powerless. Companies used to train internally - watch an older TV show (or even something like Better Call Saul) and see how many characters "worked their way up from the mail room". The death of company loyalty goes both ways but I'm sure it can be mended with some effort. Where I work one of the better pro…

But why would you expect women to be more like to choose the approach of not graduating than men, though? Women have the same options to attend university as men. It seems more likely to me that the proportions of applicants without a degree are similar to the ones with degrees.

Options don't exist in a vacuum. I had the option of signing up to the military, but my upbringing, preferences, and economic/social status made it almost certain I wouldn't. I had free will to make the choice but the outcome was almost foregone.

I think women in tech is a very similar situation. The article states that women graduate from bootcamps at a rate twice that of traditional CS courses. I'd say this is because there's less friction to join, so anything pushing them away is more easily overcome.

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

#288

Post by AdrianB1 »

logfromblammo wrote: post #38
deogeo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. You would win that bet - Google is 54.4% white, 39.8% asian, according to https://diversity.google/annual-report/#!#_this-years-data The US is 61.5% white, so whites are underrepresented at Google.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to match the demographics of the entire US unless they have a uniform presence across the entire US, such as one might find with Wal-Mart. It's a big country, and the people tend to aggregate into clumps. Alphabet keeps about 1/4 of its people in Mountain View. In terms of the demographics of San Francisco metropolitan area, those diversity report numbers likely only sli…

But what demographics were used to target 50% females?

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

#289

Post by neilparikh »

nradov wrote: post #17

My alma mater Harvey Mudd College has had rough gender parity in Computer Science for several years now. It's a small school but other colleges could learn from their practices. https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-...

They have parity because a woman who applies is 2.5x more likely to be admitted compared to man who applies [0]. I think this is probably reasonable, since more there are likely more qualified applicants than spots, so all of the admitted students will be qualified either way.

However, I think it should still be mentioned as one of the key reasons why they have parity, rather than claiming it's simply due to changing the culture and courses, especially if we're asking other institutions to learn from them.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/1...

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

#290

Post by shkkmo »

oh_sigh wrote: post #253
age_bronze wrote: post #219

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 know…

There's also the weirdness of these equality crusaders defining what white males are doing as the norm, and as the world should be, and trying to make other groups more like white males in certain respects. What if the rate at which women enter, say, CS, relative to other fields is actaully the "correct" rate, and the male population's numbers are inflated for some bad reason?

The article points that specific entry points into the field are more biased than others. If you stop gatekeeping on these biased entry points, you will end up with a much more diverse workforce that correctly represents this "correct rate" rather than the biases of the industry.
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