Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by ipaddr » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

conception wrote: post #179

ipaddr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that overcome systemic bias, eg prevalent poverty in many minority groups. The poor don’t have resources, wealth or contacts, to become a super coder/manager/whatever so they don’t make it into your applicant pool based on skill alone in the first place. The cycle continues. Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in the cold, etc etc.…

You need to fix that at the education level. Offering free top notch education can go a long way.

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

#202

Post by thu2111 » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #51

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…

That's one take. Another take is that people want chums at work. An average person hires someone they see themselves as being friends with rather than the best qualified candidate. Animals such as bees, monkeys, and ourselves are also biased to favor their genetic group (kin selection). In other words, you subconsciously favor people who look like you and act like you. In that light, the non diverse office might be s…

It sure would be easier to build software firms if every job got thousands of qualified applicants. Obviously, that isn't the case.

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

#203

Post by jimbob45 » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

ibudiallo wrote: post #132

I wrote about my experience as a black developer not too long ago [1]. At first, you are shocked when you hear some insensitive comments made around you. Then you realize no one else even notices, so it must be something wrong with you. Eventually you ignore it. When someone says something stupid, you rationalize it and move on. After all, you are only just here to do a job. But then you get angry. You are angry at e…

Both whites and blacks get bullied the same amount but when it happens to a black person, it’s racism and is actually taken seriously.

I get called dipshit and you get called the N-word. Why race-based bullying has suddenly become considered worse is beyond me.

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

#204

Post by thu2111 » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #64

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…

You can always do affirmative action like Google. Invite the minorities to boot camps, coaching and mentoring programmes and so on... But subject them to the regular interview process and hiring bar.

Even when I was there years ago, it was common knowledge amongst those of us who did hiring that women had an easier time in the interview process. For example, females could not fail the first phone screens. They would always be forwarded to on-site interviews regardless of earlier performance. The justification was that weak performance at the initial screens would be taken into account later by the hiring committee, however men were given no such second chances.

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

#205

Post by mcculley » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

I am amused about these perceptions of bias in “tech”, especially coming from those with little experience elsewhere. I work in tech and also in the tugboat industry. My consulting work has brought me into organizations in many industries. Tech is much better at being fair to minorities and the otherwise disadvantaged than non-tech industries. I don’t know how people end up complaining about tech without noticing the rest of the world around them. Have they wondered why the people who work on their car or dispose of their garbage are primarily men? Of the misogynists and racists with whom I interact, tech has the least representation.

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

#206

Post by rsweeney21 » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:16 PM UTC

conception wrote: post #179

ipaddr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that overcome systemic bias, eg prevalent poverty in many minority groups. The poor don’t have resources, wealth or contacts, to become a super coder/manager/whatever so they don’t make it into your applicant pool based on skill alone in the first place. The cycle continues. Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in the cold, etc etc.…

The systemic bias I faced was that people assumed I was poor, didn't have resources, wealth or contacts because I am a Native American.

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

#207

Post by op03 » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #118

rsweeney21 wrote: post #37

I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…

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…

You are wondering about the wrong thing. Companies/Orgs are not designed to pull this type of stuff off. And thats the end of the story right there.

Society has developed other mechanisms precisely because orgs are dumb as shit at handling complexity.

Its sort of like encouraging 2nd graders to think about 10th grade problems. They need a whole lot of help and time from someone else before they can. Thats why the East India Company runs to King or Goldman runs to the President or Jack Ma evaporates from the earth when things get too complex.

Orgs are just dumb simple parts of society like the ribosome is a part of a cell. Expecting the ribosome to morph into something it is not just because every part of the ribosome has good intentions and feels it can be doing much more to influence the behavior of one cell, or a clump of them and therefore the whole body makes for a good Pixar movie and Google hiring material. But in real life that stuff happens on very different time scales and by very different institutions.

If you want to change the world don't work in the corporate world. Work in places that supervise them.

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

#208

Post by koyote » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:22 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #188

koyote wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost stopped reading there. That sentence, no matter how I try to interpret it, seems like very common and genuine advice to a new graduate starter.

Why stop reading there? No one is right all the time and the author is probably younger than you. But her experience is also different from yours. It would be good not to assume they are wrong simply because you think they misunderstood something.

> Why stop reading there?

I said 'almost'.

If you started reading a blog post on a topic and the very first example in the opening paragraph is a clear misinterpretation then it is quite natural to assume that the rest of the post will follow that trend. That's all part of critical thinking and the automatic assessment of trustworthiness any human being will engage when reading/listening to someone's ideas/opinions/experiences.

I gave the article the benefit of the doubt and continued reading; the rest of the post illustrates clear discrimination experiences so I am glad I continued reading.

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

#209

Post by malandrew » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:25 PM UTC

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #160

ipaddr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

my company has done this and while it's not illegal to provide the incentives, I don't understand how they can expect it not to result in illegal hiring behavior (discrimination based on protected class) by those optimizing for those incentives.

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

#210

Post by traverseda » Mon, Mar 08, 2021, 11:25 PM UTC

tonystubblebine wrote: post #60

rsweeney21 wrote: post #37

I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…

The reaction you had resonated with me in that it's the feeling I most want to avoid giving someone else. I'm a white male hiring manager who is often incorporating explicit diversity/inclusion strategies into work. It's tricky--like tap dancing around all the ways that the work can go wrong. And this is one I overindex for. I never want someone to think they are a token. IMO, there are five main motivations for havi…

>One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit.

I don't really understand this. Isn't any kind of race based discrimination going to potentially cause legal liability? At the end of the day you're advocating for a policy of race/gender based discrimination, and I don't really get why you'd think it wouldn't be opening yourself up to liability with programs like these?

Have you actually talked to a lawyer about this? I've looked into in the the past, and while it seems to have a stronger case in Canada (where I live) I haven't really seen anything to suggest it's legal in the US unless you're a school.

Admittedly you're probably not going to be the case the brings it tumbling down, but it still seems like explicitly basing your hiring decisions on race open you up to a whole lot of potential liability.