What is the engineering hiring bar?

But in the circle of people that I've talked to, everybody else uses frameworks, and I doubt they could make surgical changes in the browser console.

So you're excluding most of today's working front-end developers, and appealing to "edge cases." I guess you could pre-screen candidates by asking, "Are you familiar with vanilla JS?"

http://vanilla-js.com/

Note: the author of that page should add React.

Is all of this modelling the problem of the hiring bar or training to beat it really solving the right problem? Do any of the solutions to this constructed problem actually work reliably or are they just elevator close buttons, frobs that may not really function but provide a sense of control?

But beyond the statistical biases, the highly-gendered nature of tech prevents women from being seen as a "good cultural fit" by hiring managers. It discourages women from pursuing CS in school, and pushes women out of tech when then do manage to get a foothold. Whereas nursing actually encourages men to apply much more proactively because people don't get hilariously defensive in that field regarding rectifying the gender disparity. But I'm certain you have lengthy, sexist rebuttals prepared for how sexism isn't real, with analogous comparisons about on the job sexual harassment and diversity hiring.

Yes, you're right! Contrary to what you previously wrote, "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias" underrepresentation is not the definition of bias. Bias is being more favorable towards some groups as compared to others. The fact that nursing is overwhelmingly women does not mean that nursing is biased against men, because men and women make different choices. If we tried to make hospitals have 50% male nurses they would likely have to institute immense bias in favor of men to achieve representation equal to the general population.

> But beyond the statistical biases, the highly-gendered nature of tech prevents women from being seen as a "good cultural fit" by hiring managers. It prevents women from being encourages to pursue CS in school, and pushes women out of tech when then do manage to get a foothold. Whereas nursing actually encourages men to apply much more proactively because people don't get hilariously defensive if it's trying to be rectified. But I'm certain you have lengthy, sexist rebuttals prepared for how sexism isn't real, with analogous comparisons about on the job sexual harassment and diversity hiring.

Again, you've demonstrated that you fully comprehend that "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias" is not at all the case. If a tech company rejects women wrongfully then they are biased against women - regardless of whether women make up 10% of engineers at the company or 90%. Representation is not bias. Bias is bias.

If you witnessed your company wrongfully reject women candidates from the hiring process then by all means your company was biased against women. I don't claim to deny what you have witnessed. But I've witnessed my current and former companies both set up policies that explicitly bias the hiring process to push the representation of women in tech roles to be closer to 50%, even though the current representation of women in tech roles was larger than the average in our metro area. Specifically it was 19% vs 23%. Were there any women that were wrongfully rejected due to "culture fit"? Maybe. But the end result is still that women in tech were more likely to work at the company than men in tech. Is this biased relative to the general population? Yes. But is the general population applying to engineering positions Dropbox? No, only the subset of those that seek a job in tech are applying to engineering positions at tech companies.

Saying tech companies are biased against female engineers because they make up 20% of their engineers is erroneous and simplistic in the same vein that saying hospitals are biased against male nurses because nurses are 10% men. Hospitals usually only have 10% male nurses because only 10% of people that want to be nurses are men. Likewise, tech companies usually have 20% women engineers because women make up 20% of people that want to be engineers. The people studying engineering are 20% female. Are these disparities due to biases in different party of society? Probably. But saying that a tech company is biased because 20% of its engineers are women, is like saying that a hospital is biased for a 10% male workforce. They reflect the population that has decided to enter these fields. The bias, if it exists, is not in the tech company is in whatever social mechanisms to which you attribute these disparities in nursing and technology. If a hospital takes measures to make men account for 20% of the workforce then they're biasing their hiring process to favor men. The fact that biases in society may be responsible for the fact that male nurses are so rare does not change this fact.

Can you elaborate on what you meant by, "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias." Your response seems to be contracting this definition rather than supporting it.