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Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

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Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#151

Post by munchbunny »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #65

It's a pretty straightforward deadlock: "We want to hire you because you'll add diversity." vs. "I don't want to be hired just because I'll add diversity." Since the solution of giving preference based on diverse attributes creates a deadlock, the problem has been framed wrong. I'm not going to posit the right framing... I'm actually not sure. But letting people know they are doing the job for reasons other than thei…

There's a pretty standard accepted approach to this for software engineers: your resume might be more likely to make it to the first phone call because of diversity, but you have to go through the same interview loop as everyone else.

The fact that you got the same competence test should be enough. Leave it at "the team thinks you can do the job."

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#152

Post by [deleted] »

handoflixue wrote: post #117
azinman2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like she’s experienced a lot of inappropriate and difficult things explicitly about gender. My only question was the cultural fit — we don’t know for sure that gender had anything to do with it. Often times when people are fired not only can you never tell them why, they are incapable of seeing, assessing, and recognizing their own flaws (particular when it comes to personal interaction versus quantitative m…

"Culture fit" without any other explanation is fairly solid evidence. First off, programming is one of the most "culture agnostic" jobs I've worked - if you're a high performer, you can absolutely get away with being an abrasive asshole. At least, if you're male. That's slowly changing, but I still find the social skills of the average programmer to be significantly below what I'd expect from, say, a minimum wage cas…

[deleted]

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#153

Post by temac »

majormajor wrote: post #62
OptionX wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right. By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.

If you cheat during a football game, there's a yardage penalty applied that gives the other team an "unearned" advantage. It's somehow plainly obvious there that if you simply say "don't commit penalties" but don't enforce it, people will cheat and commit penalties . And this wouldn't be fair or just. Yet people lose their shit when it comes to trying to apply proactive equalizers to a historically deeply unfair soci…

So you think countries are necessarily made of teams of extremely cohesive people organized by e.g. skin color? And that all their members shall be jointly punished in case of wrongdoing of other members or even of their ancestors? Some of the results of that policy, if applied in its entirety, could well be not what you seem to expect. And I'm not to say that would be fair, when looking at an appropriate big picture, but let's not fall into infalsifiable hypotheses either. Nor complete essentialisation.

I agree with the need to attempt to correct unfairness by starting early, though. Just also pay attention to confounding factors, and never lose sight of the goal.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#154

Post by AnthonyMouse »

anthony_romeo wrote: post #136
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion. Which is why the entire concept of demographics-based "diversity" is such a shambles. The premise is supposed to be that if you get some women and minorities in there then you'll have a divers…

Your overall stance seems to require the assumption that “diversity on paper” is the more common/significant outcome relative to “diversity of opinion”. Do you happen to have any info which might support such an assumption?

The thing you're asking for is the source of the problem. It's the Seeing Like A State thing. If you had some kind of actually robust diversity metric and not something which is going to get crushed into a black hole by Goodhart's Law then you would have a solution to the problem, but if you don't then you can't even measure it.

If you wanted actual diversity then what you would presumably do is gather all the data you can on multiple metrics (birthplace, parental income, culture, language, etc.) and then hire for maximum entropy. "Diversity" hiring based on a specific individual metric is literally the opposite of that, because it finds the people who are the least unlike the existing people in your company but can check the box on the form.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#155

Post by lovegoblin »

CodeMage wrote: post #93
SavantIdiot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of a non-diverse company that doesn't understand diversity trying to implement some kind of diversity. I recall these kinds of ham-fisted attempts everywhere in the late 90's. Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity. I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity…

> When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572082239488...

There's always a relevant xkcd, right? https://xkcd.com/385/

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#156

Post by kvetching »

ipaddr wrote: post #149
munificent wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this sounds horribly cringe-inducing and I don't fault you at all for walking away from IBM. At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkw…

Just hire based on skill / experience and don't not hire someone because they are a minority. Basic fair hiring goes a long way. If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places. To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.

You clearly don't understand Equity.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#157

Post by jeofken »

coldtea wrote: post #130

Two things some people have difficulty differentiating between: - Being discriminated or insulted for being X vs: - Made fun or insulted with reference to X Not getting a job, a promotion, or even simply heard by your colleagues because you're X is discrimination. Being treated worse because of X is discrimination. Being called anti-X slurs by people considering X being inferior is racism. But being insulted or made…

Males joke with cruelty to test each other. We do in every culture. If you are not strong and team focused enough to laugh it off and banter, you are not trustworthy to carry your load for the group.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#158

Post by zdragnar »

vlod wrote: post #134
f154hfds wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.

Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang... This is the first time I've heard of this push-back. I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?

Advocating race neutrality is argued by anti-racist training types as ignoring the historical oppression that various groups have faced. Basically, it is why "equality" is out and "equity" is the new buzzword.

YMMV.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#159

Post by vlod »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #97
908B64B197 wrote: post #2

> I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical challenges. That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it. When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other one…

We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded auditions. Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent. During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than hist…

I've read about this before (some fancy orchestra, not sure if it's the same one as you've mentioned) and I went to one of those "Let's get more X in technology" speeches. They had some crazy complicated ways to solve this (not Occam's Razor thinking).

I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and suggested blind tests for tech recruiting.

i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to subconsciously discriminate and pass their resume to the hiring team. Not perfect, but it gives X at least a better shot.

I was pretty much told it would never work and there were better ways and dismissed with a wave of a hand.

So why don't we do these somewhat blind tests?

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#160

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

ipaddr wrote: post #149
munificent wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this sounds horribly cringe-inducing and I don't fault you at all for walking away from IBM. At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkw…

Just hire based on skill / experience and don't not hire someone because they are a minority. Basic fair hiring goes a long way. If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places. To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.

Oh, I think initial guidelines had that.

And then it was all tramped on by some insane incentive like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a particular person actually gets to hire. Or a stack ranking based on the same.

All it takes is just one perverse component in the mix.

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