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

#491

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 6:38 AM UTC

CapricornNoble wrote: post #485

DoreenMichele wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think enough are due to societal environment that this is something we can work on, but not by arbitrarily saying things like "We want to hire more women in tech." I posted something of a "case study" in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695925 It's currently downvoted and has one not very nice reply. I guess it's far less of a shit show than it really "should" be, but this is kind of par for…

>>>And I think I can't get that primarily because men basically are nice to women when they are looking for sex and that's pretty much it. And they actively avoid being too nice to any woman they aren't trying to sleep with for fear of it having some kind of negative outcome, such as an unintended affair or career-damaging gossip. You're not wrong....but I'm in no way, shape, or form surprised by this gender dynamic.…

My (totally unsolicited) ¥2 is you probably need to overcome that assumption very early in any conversation if you expect assistance

I've been celibate for medical reasons for over 14 years. I've been a member in good standing here for over a decade. I've gone to great lengths to avoid trouble. So far that seems to benefit me just enough to not yet be banned and that's it.

And it really shouldn't be that way. And I don't feel any good would come out of digging into those details here and now.

Do some social engineering to reveal their physical locations. Then strap tannerite-based nailbombs to UAVs? As long as we are brainstorming here...

That's good for a chuckle, but the reality is I'm far too poor to do anything like that. I'm not exaggerating when I say I routinely don't have enough money for food.

If I could come up with the means to assassinate six or ten assholes across the globe from a distance, I probably would be wealthy enough to pay cash for the building I want and would, therefore, have no reason to be sitting around stewing and wishing a few assholes would choke to death on their next bowl of soup.

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

#492

Post by sfink » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #383

trophycase wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying biology is "limiting" anything. That's the crux. They are choosing something else. Not better and not worse, but something they feel better suits their needs or desires. CS isn't some magical field that floats on air. In fact, it's mostly a miserable profession with managers who don't understand how it works, cooped up in an office the whole day under artificial white light while sitting on your ass.

I can’t shake the feeling that the women who leave programming because it’s “unwelcoming” don’t realize that it’s just as miserable a profession with managers who don’t understand how it works cooped up in an office the whole day under artificial light for men as it is for women.

Uh, sure, there are common negatives. But from what I can tell, it really does appear that women have to put up with a boatload more shit than men in addition to the negatives they have in common. And a lot of it hits in exactly the areas that make up for the rest of the shit - try having every one of your nonobvious decisions challenged, subtly or overtly, and see how easy it is to work through your problems with managers or whatever.

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

#493

Post by CapricornNoble » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

wsy wrote: post #298

AdrianB1 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually any psychologist can contradict you easily. If you find arguments like "men are on average taller and heavier than women" to be sexist, you have a wrong sense of what sexism is.

Your examples are not related to software engineering. Please name software engineering related biological differences between men and women, backed by solid scientific studies.

Do we even have a scientifically-backed set of essential biological or cognitive skills related to software engineering?

I would probably start with [1] and [2].

Paper [3] concludes that sex-based differences in risk tolerance tangibly impacted approaches to spatial navigation AND program development.

There's a few others on spatial cognition and mental information processing: [4][5][6]. Paper[5] in particular links spatial cognition to mental modeling, which was identified in [1] as a software engineering skill. And [6] directly connects it to navigating source code.

[1]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eafe/74dddaf7ada62a52a2e712...

[2]https://web.stanford.edu/~roypea/RoyPDF%20folder/A17_Pea_Kur...

[3]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4021352

[4]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

[5]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2729....

[6]https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1268852

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

#494

Post by freddie_mercury » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 7:01 AM UTC

datashow wrote: post #452

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…

The problem is how you gonna find a different hiring pattern to force 50%? Internal training, ok, but are you going to only provide internal training to women? Is this even legal? Basecamp training, ok, but are you going to only provide basecamp training to women? Is this even legal? Special talents (dropouts etc.), ok, but are you going to only hire special talents who are women? Is this even legal? Non-traditional…

Always interesting that on Hacker News, people are always so ready to throw in the towel and call something impossible and list the 83 reasons why.

Unless it is about starting a business and making money via ads.... Then they're willing to devote thousand of hours of their life thinking creatively about how to solve problems to "change the world".

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

#495

Post by CapricornNoble » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 7:06 AM UTC

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…

>>>Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies?

And it's not like it's ALL professions. I don't see anybody pushing for 50% female representation in coal mining, logging, or waste management.

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

#496

Post by hackinthebochs » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 7:11 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #486

hackinthebochs wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's what the interviews are for, no? The point of the article is that if you are using degrees as a filter, you're passing on a lot of otherwise qualified candidates.

I agree, but I don't think there is a substantial number of software shops that use relevant degrees as a hard filter, nor is there a significant number of non-degree holders bursting with realized CS talent that the field is somehow blind to.

I took the intended sentiment to be that of finding talent among non-degree holders that won't necessarily present itself in a typical CS interview scenario. Thus we need a way to identify future CS talent that is merely in need of training and mentoring. And so the problem reduces to, in my opinion, to finding people who are smart and unusually self-motivated. But there is just no good way of doing this.

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

#497

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 7:11 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #193

TeMPOraL wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is: because of 2), less women enter the pipeline that leads to a job that's less social and more about things, relative to other occupations, therefore 1). 2) is presented here as a plausible explanation of 1). The connection is very clear, so the validity of that view depends entirely on the validity of point 2) itself. Damore presented a boatload of links to research supporting that point, and plenty o…

> The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist The concept that men and women may have different interests due to biological differences is extremely sexist, yes. For all the sources Damore cited, there's an entire body of academic work (and an entire cultural revolution in the United States spanning upwards of a century) to the contrary on that topic specifically. A large chunk of…

A large chunk of the feminist movement was and is women and men actively working to prove that biology is not a limiting factor in what women can choose to do with themselves

That's got nothing at all to do with what was being suggested.

Saying women have different "interests" -- or priorities, which is a better word in my opinion -- isn't suggesting they are incapable nor suggesting society should constrain their role. It's suggesting they have agency and make choices which fail to serve some abstract narrative about the theoretical importance of so-called equality of the sort that gets debated and hypothesized about in articles like the one under discussion.

I was a homemaker for a lot of years. Self-proclaimed feminists have a long history of being incredibly ugly to me.

I'm not the only person who has noticed that feminists are basically openly hostile and contemptuous towards homemakers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ1xOOyENmw

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

#498

Post by 4bpp » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 7:12 AM UTC

shajhansbx wrote: post #277

4bpp wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like your problem is not so much any actual discrimination as it is the expectation of it, and you are suffering real disadvantages due to that expectation. It might be better to try to reduce your consumption of US culture war content (including this article and discussion thread) and maybe even seek the company of more people who are not constantly preoccupied with it.

People of color don’t have a switch that allows them to turn off the experience of being a person of color. Your comment amounts to a claim that sbilstein is inventing all of the issues he’s faced in life. If you’re seriously claiming that people of color aren’t treated differently, look at the implicit bias test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ It’s a very easily reproducible experiment (you can conduct it on…

I don't understand how you get that out of my comment. Regardless of what problems the parent poster actually faced, it's clear from their descriptions that (1) at this point they are genuinely experiencing problems from their expectation of discrimination (it's not like the "anxieties and nervousness" creeping into their heads would have any benefit even if the interviewers are in fact biased against them!), and (2) their usage of terms like "LatinX" indicates that they had a lot of exposure to the sort of writings that tell them to expect concealed discriminatory attitudes in everyone - which, even if true, is very unlikely to be a healthy or useful mindset for the putative target of those discriminatory attitudes to have.

I would argue it is comparable to (an outward-oriented version of) body dysmorphic disorder: instead of social anxiety due to the perception that people are disgusted by your appearance, you get social anxiety due to the perception that people hold a negative view of your ethnicity.

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

#499

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 7:15 AM UTC

klipt wrote: post #411

trophycase wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With what modern medicine can do, sorta, kinda, in the West, if you're wealthy enough. Freezing eggs is nowhere near standard practice (though with ever growing credentialism, it may well just become such), and having kids (really: starting a family) involves a lot of other things than just getting some sperm and an egg to occupy the same space at the same time.

(Also, really, modern tech is currently one of the most family-friendly profession out there, because of demand surplus. I think GP is talking about women living a different reality than men, not about women not wanting to go to tech strictly because of it.)

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

#500

Post by CapricornNoble » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 7:19 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #194

seangrogg wrote: post #20

I'll preface this with the usual "my views are my own" but I do think that diversity in the workplace is a very deep and interesting problem and that we do a major disservice to it by creating ridiculous metrics. I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender; "We aim to have 50% women in the workplace" is a prime example of this. If this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is…

This is a strawman argument. The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things. It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that…

>>>The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations

There's also 99 men for every 1 woman working in coal mining. Why is no one (especially women) advocating we "fix" this gender disparity?