Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 668 posts

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

#361

Post by trophycase »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #335
trophycase wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it isn't their responsibility. Clearly they don't have trouble making profit so why would they spend billions of dollars trying to urge people who may or may not even want the job to try and do it?

Billions are being spent on housing in the bay area by these ultra rich companies even though it is arguably not at all their responsibility. Except it is, because of course it is. Who is responsible for fixing the gender imbalance in tech, if not the leaders in tech? (Of course the housing thing may just be a cynical calculation that it’s cheaper than the toxic public relations of doing nothing. But maybe that shoul…

They are? Hilarious since it seemingly has no impact at all.

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

#362

Post by jonfw »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #335
trophycase wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it isn't their responsibility. Clearly they don't have trouble making profit so why would they spend billions of dollars trying to urge people who may or may not even want the job to try and do it?

Billions are being spent on housing in the bay area by these ultra rich companies even though it is arguably not at all their responsibility. Except it is, because of course it is. Who is responsible for fixing the gender imbalance in tech, if not the leaders in tech? (Of course the housing thing may just be a cynical calculation that it’s cheaper than the toxic public relations of doing nothing. But maybe that shoul…

> fixing the gender imbalance

An imbalance doesn't inherently need to be fixed. If the imbalance is because women are simply less interested- an imbalance is desirable.

Equality in opportunity will not neccessarily lead to equality in outcome. Any argument on this topic that is rooted in outcomes can be immediately dismissed. Attempt to measure the actual source of the problem- which is opportunity.

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

#363

Post by rcatcher »

sbilstein wrote: post #2

I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs. After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating…

I'm relatively new to the US, can anyone explain why Asians or LatinX people born in the US in middle-class families should get better treatment than "white" immigrants who recently came from poor Eastern European countries?

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

#364

Post by qmmmur »

trophycase wrote: post #322
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I work at a FAANG company which has terrible diversity numbers in hardware development. Upper management is frequently asked about this by employees at big q&a sessions. The answer is always to blame the pipeline, as if we do not have billions of dollars that we could direct at solving it ourselves...

Except it isn't their responsibility. Clearly they don't have trouble making profit so why would they spend billions of dollars trying to urge people who may or may not even want the job to try and do it?

I like to think that companies run by humans don't solely consider profit as their only metric for success. If you're not solvent you can't do much as a company but it surely helps to actually give a shit about the people you affect both immediately and from a distance in both circumstance and over time.

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

#365

Post by sukilot »

sbilstein wrote: post #2

I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs. After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating…

> I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes

It's interesting that you went on to describe your bias against white interviewers. It's going to be quite difficult for white people to hire non-white people into their organization if non-white people are biased against performing well for white interviewers.

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

#366

Post by libraryofbabel »

ben_jones wrote: post #323
hellisothers wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the article is that restricting your hiring pool to only CS graduates is a bad pattern and you should consider other qualities instead so saying only 18% of CS graduates are female misses the point. Having no CS degree myself and excelling in a top 10 company I agree with this sentiment, especially seeing the epidemic of “over leveling” the small pool of CS graduates occurring. I’d rather work with…

I’m a drop out too and have made my way to manager where I find myself training juniors many of which also do not have degrees. Unfortunately it is night and day between the ones who do have degrees and those that don’t. At this point I am now strongly recommending cs degrees to anyone seeking a career in programming because the theories do come up in any serious work, particularly full stack engineers who must have…

I'm currently teaching a class on databases to 10 junior engineers at a medium size org (~130 engineers). It's a huge amount of work but wonderfully fun and rewarding. The class is an even mix of CS grads and engineers from nontraditional backgrounds (mostly bootcamps). I myself trained in applied math and am a self-taught engineer who had a few good mentors along the way.

Having a CS degree perhaps helps a little for general background, but not every CS major has taken a db class and even then, they won't have learned many useful practical skills, like analyzing and fixing a slow production query. And conversely the folks who have been through bootcamps (that we have hired!) are all very self-directed and highly motivated to learn. So I'm not sure that the difference is quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.

I do completely agree with you that this is important, and that it's very hard to get companies to devote resources to it. Taking 6-8 hours a week out of a senior engineer's time to prepare and teach an effective class is a big ask; I had a lot of support from management to do this but I think that might be a rare luxury at other companies.

It's just sad that the tech industry doesn't invest more in high-quality structured teaching, when it could so clearly deliver benefits in terms of growing skills for engineers from both CS and non CS backgrounds. Assuming that they'll somehow learn everything they need without structure or direction might work in a few cases, but in general it's a poor long term strategy for both companies and the industry as a whole.

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

#367

Post by sukilot »

commandlinefan wrote: post #90
sbilstein wrote: post #2

I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs. After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating…

> I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting Ok, see, this assertion bugs me. The linked post SPECIFICALLY talks about biasing hiring and recruiting in favor of women. Diversity efforts, by definition, are hiring and recruiting bias, but for supposedly benevolent reasons. But you’re dismissing that and implying that there are subtle, hidden, unremovable biases that only certain people are capable of…

Even if it is in the imagination of the interviewee, it's still evidence that the interview is failing at its job of assessing who could be successful in the job.

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

#368

Post by kelnos »

HeroOfAges wrote: post #196
spamizbad wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of perspective taking. If a "Never saw a line of code until I took this class" sits between two "Coding since 11" students, they're going to watch their neighbors effortlessly breeze through the curriculum. If they don't know those student's background, it's not unreasonable if they come to the (false) conclusion that they're not cut out to be a developer because it's just so much easier for "everyone e…

Even if you do have a "fast" track and a "slow" track, the only ways I can think of to get travelers on either of these paths to the same place at the same time is to either slow down those on the "fast" track, or speed up those on the "slow" track. What I seem to be witnessing is a willingness of people to slow down those on the "fast" track instead of expecting people on the "slow" track to work harder to catch up.

That assumes that there's no "padding" built in, and that to complete a 4-year CS degree you need to be focused on CS for every class that you take, every minute of the day.

Not a perfect analogy, but: due to my AP scores, I placed out of the first two semesters of the four-semester mathematics requirements. After two years, I didn't know more math than those who didn't place out, I just finished learning it a little earlier.

People with existing programming experience will start off at a slightly higher level than those without, but the latter group will end up in roughly the same place, by taking an elective or three fewer.

And even if they don't, so what? Maybe someone with more experience ends up diving deep into OS design, compiler writing, and database design, while someone with less experience only gets to dive deep into database design. The CS program has still prepared both groups for their first job after they graduate (or their masters/PhD program, if they choose that route), some people might just have less or more to learn later as they grow into the rest of their lives. This is true of pretty much any profession; programming is by no means unique here.

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

#369

Post by axoltl »

jonfw wrote: post #360
pksdjfikkkkdsff wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

to build on this- among younger age groups- women are more likely to be college graduates than men. Women willingly choose different education paths because of different interests.

That's not true. Harvey Mudd made changes to their CS program to remove bias and now more than half of its computer science majors are women. There is some very insidious bias in the pipeline that isn't explained away with "but different interests".

https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...

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

#370

Post by sukilot »

huherto wrote: post #300
shadowgovt wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I knew what to do to help ameliorate the anxieties you've experienced, because as the white guy giving the interviews, I'm terrified that something about my approach or demeanor is enhancing those anxieties in my candidates (and I've seen entirely too many promising candidates wash out where I had to put as my feedback "I think they can do this, but they couldn't do it during the interview, and I suspect they…

Hispanic here. I interviewed with Google and I did terribly bad. I was surprised how nice and patient my interviewer was. There is a lot of self imposed pressure as this is Google. I felt the interview went from 0 to 60MPh really fast. My mind was blocked instantly. I also needed to study specifically for this. It seems that on the job experience is not enough. You really need to train for it.

This is the same for almost all candidates of all races and genders.

https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/interview/#interviews...

Post reply on HN