Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not employed. Not shopping for jobs either. Wait, isn't this the exact definition of privilege?
You're imagining wealthy enough not to need to work. There is also homeless.
Or retired.
Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
271–280 of 666 posts
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife works for a company that does tons of business with a FAANG company. They’re putting together a presentation for the client about how diverse they are (“we have all of the sexual identities!”). They also told a Mexican guy he wasn’t diverse enough to give the presentation because he was (1) a man and (2) his accent wasn’t thick enough—it might not be clear that he is “diverse”. It’s over the top even by post-…
It didn’t take long after Silicon Valley was no longer on the air for the entire industry to become more absurd than its parody. I really don’t think any of this is sustainable either. Latinos in particular seem very opposed to this stuff & given that they are part of the fastest growing demographic in the country I don’t see how political support for policies like this can be maintained.
I recently made a move from Seattle to Dallas.
While in Seattle I was consumed by the thought that all of American academia, business, and media was consumed by idpol and other associated confusions. In Seattle, every interaction is permeated by conversations about identity, and friend groups are highly segregated by class, if not race.
Moving to Dallas completely changed my perspective. Dallas is an actual multicultural utopia. Everywhere I went, people of all kinds were doing stuff together, and not in the soft late 90s ghetto mural of rainbows and people holding hands, I mean just hanging out as if you would with friends from your neighborhood. Funny that in practice, Texas is significantly less class and race divided than Seattle.
I'm happy that latinos reject this stuff. I'm even more happy to know that it hasn't spread throughout the entire US.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife works for a company that does tons of business with a FAANG company. They’re putting together a presentation for the client about how diverse they are (“we have all of the sexual identities!”). They also told a Mexican guy he wasn’t diverse enough to give the presentation because he was (1) a man and (2) his accent wasn’t thick enough—it might not be clear that he is “diverse”. It’s over the top even by post-…
It didn’t take long after Silicon Valley was no longer on the air for the entire industry to become more absurd than its parody. I really don’t think any of this is sustainable either. Latinos in particular seem very opposed to this stuff & given that they are part of the fastest growing demographic in the country I don’t see how political support for policies like this can be maintained.
These politics only appeal to ~10% of the population anyway, and they aren't favored by a majority of any ethnicity. This stuff isn't mainstream because voters like it (which is why it never makes its way into any real laws), it's mainstream because the cultural and media elites like it and they don't have to trifle with a democratic process to impose it.
Corporate DEI stuff is also useful to "prove" that an employer isn't racist--current anti-discrimination law puts the burden of proof on employers to show that they didn't discriminate, and since it's not possible to prove a negative, they must instead compete to show that they're among the more 'woke' companies ("look at our DEI propaganda, how could we possibly be guilty of discrimination?").
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#274Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup. The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.” All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side. I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
So what, let'em choose to work with whoever they want. If it's all women, so be it. Only men? Whatever. I don't wanna work in either of these organizations. I think the best answer to these divisive, sexist or racist behaviors is to show them in practice they're dumb, kick their ass in the market. An open-minded, welcoming organization is going to attract the best minds. Collectively, these people will kick those ide…
The challenge I have with this is that performance in "the market" does not correlate so easily with the kind of team composition the GP is talking about. And as someone who has worked for large corporations, these companies rarely seem to suffer that much from dysfunctional teams and rotten eggs in key places.
>"The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society."
I'd argue that changing minds does not need to be an objective of legislation. Sometimes there's just a behavior you want to prevent and it doesn't matter if people truly agree with the reason why.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#275Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup. The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.” All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side. I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
HR department at a previous workplace was like that. All women, all friends, all worked with each other or were relatives of someone... their personal lives were entirely intertwined with work. Most weren't at work most days and this was when they had a no work from home policy years ago. Loud personal calls all day long. I wasn't even in that department and the drama that came from it was exhausting. They would ofte…
> Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team
At some point we have to start recognizing that forcing employees to attend work parties and lunches and other events by using social shame tactics like this creates a hostile work environment.
Managers who enable this are toxic as hell.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#276About 10 years ago, I consulted for a huge company in St Louis. St Louis’s racial makeup is approximately 50% white and 50% black. In the company’s IT group, the makeup was 50% white males, and 50% Indian. The only African Americans were the security guards.
If companies were serious about DEI goals, they would require their contracted IT consultancies to have a representative racial makeup of the local population.
I’d happily support any company with that DEI goal. Anyone know of one?
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more. So like, seeing that type of application is in an indication that the person's first twenty years of career haven't yielded the kinds of achievements and contact network that have bumped them out of the hustle and into the world where they no longer be…
> It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more. I really wish people would stop this. I don't really keep in touch with many coworkers due to time. My friends tend to come from outside of work and they're not software devs. It definitely is age-ism adjacent; having to "network" to get a job is muc…
>having to "network" to get a job is much harder after you get older.
hard but I'm not sure about harder than a new grad. contacting someone you worked with years ago is still preferable to cold contacting someone you only have a shallow connection to (same school, maybe you talked for a day at a conference, etc.).
They don't have to be friends, just collogues who can vouch for you.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was willing to listen to your point (that perhaps some companies favor women and so women disproportionately percolate to those companies… at least in theory seems like a possible argument, even if I’m skeptical) until you got here: >> Also, because the intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end, a company will be disproportionately male simply by being more technical and having a more difficult hi…
> It has nothing to do with intelligence curves. Agreed. A vast majority of supposedly "high tech" jobs are solidly average intelligence, including coding, so if anything women should be rewarded in such positions because males' wider variance in I.Q. cuts both ways. It's only pure delusional thinking that keeps up the "muh I.Q. is one of the highest" attitude among "tech" bros.
Average intelligence (around 100 points) does not get you hired in any high tech job. It is called "high tech" for a reason, it's not "average work" by any measure.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm almost 50. I've been working in tech since 1996, and at this point, despite being a strong and seasoned engineer, I'm getting comments like, "it's different now", or "back in your day", etc, and the very young engineers fresh from school are the ones throwing this around. Those with a few years of experience under their belt don't. It's really disheartening, but it's also my job to train these bozos and turn them…
Yes and no to fresh engineers being good. I’ve met many fresh engineers that integrated and soon outperformed their older peers in a couple months. My first engineer position I went from new hire to lead on most projects in about a year. I was surprised and dumbfounded how much better I was than my peers (expect one he was amazing and I learned a lot from him). There a lot of good and bad engineers and experience doe…
Certainly, the variance between engineers is huge and can offset experience.
Over time, though, the bad older engineers get managed out of the profession, or leave out of frustration or lack of satisfaction, so you end up having fewer. The selection function for good engineers has had much longer to run on them.
Think of experience as a trend line which pushes everyone to be better relative to what they were. School teaches algorithms, languages, tools, but it doesn't teach things like engineering approaches and how to keep a team productive, which doesn't always mean the most awesome algorithms. School teaches how to get the "correct" answer, experience teaches how to get "good enough" in a short amount of time. You need both!
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#280During my career, I've seen enough discrimination in the name of DEI as well. But what bothers me more is the ageism. The number of times an old person has been rejected from a job is too damn high. The reasons have always been "he may not work well with young people", "seniority complex", "he is over qualified" etc. Most of the times, they were more than qualified. I fear when I am into 40s or 50s, I will face the s…
> During my career, I've seen enough discrimination in the name of DEI as well. At my work recently, we interviewed a white male and an asian female for the job. To my knowledge, this is the first female applicant we've gotten because they generally get snapped up by higher prestige/visibility roles. I've interviewed many people before, and the manager will request feedback about the applicants and use whichever had…
Please let them know, but do so as anonymously as is possible. Consider an email from a proton burner address via VPN, printed letter mailed from somewhere other than where you live (maybe even from your office if there are no cameras). Depending on the size of the company, discovery during a lawsuit like this can get insanely detailed and expensive.