This is a challenging issue. I see a few reasons that companies want to increase demographic diversity. One would be that some companies are trying to address more demographically diverse markets and having more diverse teams may reveal more opportunities, or at least help to prevent blunders. For example, if you have people from many skin tones on your team, it's natural for then to say attempt to use a product on themselves and not fix it. If you don't have someone on the team (or at least in a test group) from those backgrounds, you may not think to test broadly--not that anyone was actively trying to be discriminatory--just that it's pretty natural to test things on yourself and within your network. Another reason is to have a stronger work force. A natural human thing to do is to recruit within networks--who did I go to school with? Work with? Where did I go to school? But, if I restrict myself to that pool, maybe I miss out on excellent candidates who went elsewhere. For example, I once found an amazing intern from a tiny college that I never heard of--but he was amazing (now staff at Carnegie Mellon). Finally, there are questions of social justice--organizations should reach out to populations that are underrepresented and ask if their recruiting/hiring processes have blind spots. On the recruiting side, are we reaching outside of our normal channels to recruit? For example, one of my coworkers took on an intern from a community college to do some physics/software project. The intern did well and transferred to the local state school and kept working--as a result, they got several job offers based on that work. On the hiring side, does the current methodology result in good hires? Are relevant characteristics being considered? For example, we sometimes bring on postdocs and as part of the review someone screens them based on their undergraduate grades. To me, this is dumb--no idea where it came from, I care about what they did during their PhD, not if they got a B in calculus as a teenager. It rates right up there with how fast they can run a 400 m race. Not terribly predictive of their ability to do research and probably results in the loss of some good candidates (for example, I met a young woman who went to a crap high school, spent college recovering from crap high school--she went to a small university for her masters and did incredibly well, and now she's at Harvard doing publishing good papers during her PhD--under the current system, she would probably not make it pass that screen). What happens once you have people in the institution is a longer discussion--basically, are people promoted fairly (based on performance)? Are these evenly applied?
Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
301–310 of 464 posts
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If everyone just started doing that" - that's the naive part. Everyone isn't. What if you do it, but others don't? Then you're not directly responsible for the issues, sure, but you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. You may not be part of the problem, but you're benefiting from the problem, and are not part of…
> Everyone isn't. My point is that there are IMHO a lot of people complaining about this (here on HN) but I don't see a lot of concrete solutions that are actionable. > you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. I presented a way that would make it somewhat fairer (looks like the orchestra approach suggested that) ti…
Lack of proposed actionable solutions does not imply a lack of problem. Especially when just convincing people that there is a problem will help avoid the problem (i.e., if everyone agreed racism exists, and is a problem, there would be fewer implicit biases coming into play).
Sure; you can create hiring processes that hide as much identifying information as possible. That doesn't address the issue in other parts of the workforce though. Trying to just be as colorblind as possible for yourself doesn't address the systemic issues, nor the biases coworkers/etc may have. It also doesn't force others to adopt the solution you propose.
Recognize the contexts people aren't blind in and be an advocate for diversity in them (not instead of ability, but alongside it). Recognize that a person's lived experience may be different from yours because of their skin color or gender. Which implies recognizing when their skin color or gender is different than yours.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say your company has a workforce where the minorities are only 5% but they are let's say 30% of the population. Would that be fair to assume that Color-blindness has failed? Or perhaps there is some kind of biais that was missed and the policies were not as color blind as they pretended to be? In that case, in order to address it, would you rather entirely ignore the issue of race (and fail again) or perhaps ha…
I think it can depend on the population that you're comparing against. If the company is a law firm, the positions being compared are entry-level lawyers, and a requirement for the role is holding a law degree, then when evaluating the law firm's hiring practices you should probably compare against the population who hold the qualifications for the role (law degree holders). If there are biases upstream of that point…
In other words, statistically biased outcomes cannot be attributed to the place where the statistic was measured, without further evidence upstream.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#304I'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…
Thank you for sharing your experience. There are more and more people who have had similar experiences that are speaking out about it and how condescended to it made them feel. It's good you were able to find an employer with whom you feel valued for your contributions and accomplishments. Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable? This is not something that is stealthly fly…
Until the "ruling class" is technical and not there by some politik and bullshitting all the way up, this is bound to happen.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#305Lol, if you get a job only because you are a woman can you stil call it imposter syndrome.
You are an actual imposter. There not fr your talent but lack of a penis.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#306Earlier 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.
But then mit would be only male asians and every it department would follow suit. There would be not female programmers at all.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#307I'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…
> this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group.
I remember reading someone's opinion basically stating that things like that for underrepresented groups are unpaid emotional labor, which I kind of agree with - it's got to be a weird position to be in to be hired to write code and somehow end up as the defacto sounding board for questions regarding the company's interactions with people similar to you. Imagine having randos come up to you and ask you for your time to pitch new ideas for how to recruit white dudes or asking questions about how it was growing up a white dude or even just people making the assumption that since you're a white dude you care about hiring more white dudes.
> what other process would we suggest?
Personal opinion alert: I feel like a lot of (not all) tech's diversity problem is a pipeline problem so maybe identifying people that belong to underrepresented groups out there doing good work getting folks from the group interested in cs/tech and then giving them more resources?
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#308Earlier 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.…
It is impossible to solve systemic bias by using discrimination. It has never worked in the past despite an untold number of attempts. In a very similar way, violence create violence in very predictable cycles.
Like violence, the solution to systemic bias are simple but unattractive. Don't display and rub symbols in people faces. Do not create ambiguous borders between groups of people. Treat each person as individual and avoid generalizations. Add social and economical support based on lack of those resources on an individual level, from the bottom up.
The progress towards equally would look very different if people weren't constantly doing the opposite in the belief that this time the symbols will convince the enemy of the wrong doing, the ambiguous borders will work, the generalizations will send the important message, and that top to bottom approach will create a foundation for change.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone isn't. My point is that there are IMHO a lot of people complaining about this (here on HN) but I don't see a lot of concrete solutions that are actionable. > you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. I presented a way that would make it somewhat fairer (looks like the orchestra approach suggested that) ti…
Lack of proposed actionable solutions does not imply a lack of problem. Especially when just convincing people that there is a problem will help avoid the problem (i.e., if everyone agreed racism exists, and is a problem, there would be fewer implicit biases coming into play). Sure; you can create hiring processes that hide as much identifying information as possible. That doesn't address the issue in other parts of…
>That doesn't address the issue in other parts of the workforce though ... nor the biases coworkers/etc may have. It also doesn't force others to adopt the solution you propose.
Of course not, but it's a start. Getting X hired and in the door, means we can at least have the opportunity to tackle problems downstream. Hoping that we can solve X-ism (for the points you mention) and then everything will magically be fixed, is going to probably take at least another 3 generations.
>Recognize the contexts people aren't blind in and be an advocate for diversity in them (not instead of ability, but alongside it). Recognize that a person's lived experience may be different from yours because of their skin color or gender. Which implies recognizing when their skin color or gender is different than yours.
All great points, however we've been doing gender/diversity training (at big tech companies at least) what ~20 years? and we are still having problems. I guess it's getting better slowly...
Growing up in the UK (Ukrainian background), I was always taught to never trust Russians because they were the cause of ALL the problems of Ukraine. Completely idiotic I know. I had never meet a Russian and the people telling me hadn't either. Sigh.
Working in NYC, yep, I was right in the middle of a team of Russians and what did I find? There was nothing crazy about them, they had a dry (similar to British) humor and I got on well with them. My prejudges fell away.
Generally IMHO we can only change our view of X, by mixing with X and realize they're just 'normal' people and that previous generations/peers that manipulate us are a bunch of idiots.
Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hiring more black people It's not like there's a large, untapped pool of talented black software engineers. I'm at a large tech company. There was a team I worked with for a big with some really talented people, the sort of team where really smart domain experts go. There was a black guy on it who asked questions showing he wasn't an obviously talented domain expert. I found out he was recruited for coming from an…
Respectfully, this is the wrong way to look at the problem. It’s true, objectively, that there are fewer minority/female CS graduates. But there’s no way that gets better if a person who is “not a subject matter expert” gets dismissed. That person needs to be trained. If they want to be expert at that subject, we as an industry need to be able to help them get there. Increasingly I believe the problem with diversity…
> If you’re a woman and you want to be a coder but all you hear about is hell stories, why would you sign up for that major
I think this is a bit more complex; think of something like Revenge of the Nerds where computer peeps are all socially inept (sometimes borderline creepy) otherworldly nerds whose only interest in life is computers.
Would you want to work in an environment like that? I wouldn't. And luckily I don't because that's not really what most programmers are like. I can count the number of people I've met that fit this stereotype on a single hand, and I've met quite a number of programmers at conferences and such over the years.
I feel these problems run much deeper than just "hell stories from women". Luckily in the last ~10/20 years attitudes seem to be changing somewhat for the better, but for a long time during the 80s, 90s, and 00s the perception of the average programmer was not especially positive.