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

#411

Post by klipt » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

trophycase wrote: post #344

kelnos wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many aspects of the differing realities are due to inherent biological differences, and how many are due to societal environment, though?

Well it's basically always possible to claim that society has some hidden variable, but I'll bite. As a woman, if you want children/family you need to secure at least a certain baseline of living quality and stability before the age of 35 and realistically much earlier. This alone dramatically changes the timeline and priorities of women.

The cost of freezing eggs is pretty small compared to tech salaries though, so if women's instincts are telling them not to go into tech because they need to hurry up and have kids, those instincts are out of date wrt what modern medicine can do.

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

#412

Post by jonfw » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

d3ad1ysp0rk wrote: post #399

jonfw wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you could showcase where women are born with DNA that leads them away from software related jobs, I would be very interested. Otherwise, "interested" is incredibly affected by environment and biases, which can be fixed, and should be.

https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...

We still have very little understanding of the human brain- but we understand enough to know that women and men are different.

The theory of evolution also provides strong support for this idea. Women and men have had different selection criteria, and therefore have evolved differences.

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

#413

Post by mlboss » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

In the article they talk about more women in tech in India than in US. India is a highly sexist society having a male child is preferred over having a female child. Still more females are in CS than in a more egalitarian society like US. I think it is because there are less economic choices in India.

So if you are going to college in India you will choose a subject that makes more economic sense. Even if that means studying a subject that you don't like that much. When there is freedom to choose profession without economic constraints people will choose subject that interests them the most.

Edit: I might be downvoted for last sentence.

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

#414

Post by crawfordcomeaux » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

There's also a cultural issue driving this that starts with programming gender and biases into kids at or before birth. It is driven, in part, by common confusions between gender, biological sex, and genitals. My partner and I didn't know what our child's genitalia was until 20+ minutes after birth. We witnessed so much unconscious (and conscious!) gendering from people throughout pregnancy and labor we decided to not share what's between our kid's legs with people. They only just turned one, so we're not sure about how this will affect them. We're doing a considerable amount of work to counter cultural programming in the hopes of raising an empowered person in such a traumatizing and disempowering world. We're planning on homeschooling them in order to focus on learning how to learn what they choose in an environment without bonds to capitalism to limit the impact of that hot mess of programming, too.

This is a collective issue and will generate pipeline issues until we collectively get our cultural programming shit together.

I think we need to collectively focus on modeling culture through the lenses of category theory and computer science, ie. maths of relationships and programming.

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

#415

Post by hackinthebochs » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #394

ben_jones wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience as somebody without a degree and employed for >15 years now, you don't need a degree to get enough understanding of type theory and statistics, even for things at senior level. It will obviously depend on the specific project, but self-learning is very much a viable option in this industry. Conversely, I've seen many candidates with a CS degree who couldn't handle trivial coding challenges (and I mea…

Yes, but the issue is how likely is an arbitrary person interested in being a programmer but lacking a degree going to be able to self-teach the vast amounts of information needed to be productive as a modern developer? I wager it is very unlikely. Those who do follow the self-taught route are 1) unusually smart and/or self-motivated or 2) got into the field when there were fewer moving parts and so self-teaching had a much smaller learning curve, then they simply matured with the field. After all the field circa 2000 looks vastly different than it does circa 2019.

The value of a degree is less the information it teaches, and more as a filter for people who are unusually smart and/or self-motivated. Those people coming with the requisite CS theory is merely a bonus.

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

#416

Post by godelski » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:27 AM 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…

> Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints?

Because 1) there is a feedback loop that does show that having role models at the end of the pipeline does help the entire pipeline. 2) It is easier than restructuring the entire pipeline than admitting that it is a societal problem rather than big bad Google being sexist (I'm not saying Google isn't sexist).

This is kind of a pattern in problems that don't have smoking guns. We like to pretend that things are first order problems (problem causes an effect, directly) when most problems are pretty high order and complex. First order problems are usually easier to solve because they have a clear smoking gun. You take care of the bad person that fired the gun and the problem is solved. I actually suspect that this is an evolutionary problem, being that most of our early problems could be approximated by first or second order and thus increase our survival rate. I'm also pretty convinced that we've solved most of those now, and thus that line of thinking doesn't work for modern problems.

But for part 1), if you have the flu, tissues help. They don't cure the flu, but they help you from preventing the spread and alleviate the symptoms. So if you take my preposition about first order problems, I don't think it is hard to see why people would get stuck at that stage. Essentially "we did something and it had a positive effect. So let's keep doing that thing!" That's not bad logic. You admit that they do have __a little__ control over the constraints, so it isn't surprising that they have __a little__ impact. The failure is not continuing to look for more potential solutions and stagnating. Just need to do some PCA, find the other factors, and push on those (as well as what we've already found to have positive effects). But this is much easier said than done, and I think that is part of the problem. Difficult problems are tautologically difficult, but we as a society like to pretend there are simple solutions (come on, admit it, you do this too).

So why do we do this? Well, how many people do you know break down complex problems into multiple components? I know very few, and even then they don't consistently do it.

> If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.

I'd argue that they would just start cheating. Which I think that there is evidence that this is happening (some being given in this article).

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

#417

Post by jonfw » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

axoltl wrote: post #369

jonfw wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Obviously with proper marketing you can target the niche.

There are more than enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of a tiny school's program. There aren't nearly enough women interested in computing to make up 50% of the market.

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

#418

Post by PopeDotNinja » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

greggman2 wrote: post #381

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…

> Companies used to train internally Please no. Japan is that way. Japan pays programmers $20k to start, no better than working fast food. Their salaries go up to $60k at the top end at most big Japanese companies and they have the attitude that anyone over 35 is too old to code. I feel the fact they hire grads with zero experience is one of the reasons. Why pay someone $$$ if they can't actually do the job yet? Conv…

> Why pay someone $$$ if they can't actually do the job yet?

Senior devs have to come from somewhere.

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

#419

Post by lordCarbonFiber » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:35 AM 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…

Ignorning the fact that many engineering orgs can't hit 10% let along 18%; you've already lost if you've restricted your pipeline to "has a CS degree". Statistically your company isn't actually hiring for jobs that need higher level CS theory. It's not assigning malice, but pure negligence. There's a huge population of competent people with amazing ROI for your business and, especially companies with pockets as deep as FAANG, ignoring them because it's perceived as less risky to hire another (cis/het/white) guy is bad optics at best.

Ironically, in my experience, the companies who figured this out a decade ago are the major finance companies. Hire anyone with a pulse, put in the effort to train them, be the only company on the block that isn't active treating these populations like shit, the you get retention rates that are unheard of in tech (especially for such comparativly shitty jobs by metric of pay and interesting things to do). Talent is there, tech companies just choose to ignore it and play into the existing biases ( and out right misogynistic streaks) that already exist.

Maybe 50% is a perfect ideal, but, don't let perfect be the enemy of better. We absolutely should be loudly shaming those at the top that "just can't find talent".

#rantsFromAnAngryTransWoman

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

#420

Post by rowanG077 » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

d3ad1ysp0rk wrote: post #399

jonfw wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you could showcase where women are born with DNA that leads them away from software related jobs, I would be very interested. Otherwise, "interested" is incredibly affected by environment and biases, which can be fixed, and should be.

We do know that more egalitarian countries lead to significantly pronounced differences in choices between male and female. That directly suggest that males and females biologically like different things.