Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#451

Post by mattgreenrocks » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:56 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #102

nabaraz wrote: post #67

During 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…

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.

This is akin to saying, "by 23, you should have moved out of your parents' house, otherwise, what's wrong with you?": it renders the speaker's presumptions into judgments.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#452

Post by ackfoobar » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:57 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #223

throwaway0wha8h wrote: post #39

Throwaway. I'm happy to have more women in tech and hope it occurs or continues. However, virtually everyone recruiting in tech has observed some toxic diversity initiatives, I would venture. Some examples I have seen personally or one degree removed from me. - pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male - people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hir…

I have mentioned this on Hacker News before: At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days. Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect. Candidate B: Had never worked in the in…

"Pale". What a great word to catch the East Asians, in addition to white people.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#453

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:57 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #410

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But because of this the interview process can get lengthy and white male candidates maybe tire of waiting and go elsewhere. So in some sense its not fair to the white male. Isn't it equally obnoxious to everyone? I'm not sure why only the white males would be put out by the wait. The wait, while due to the lengthy interview process, isn't due to them being white males. Unless you interview the white males first for…

If you need to wait for someone who is 1% off the population you might be waiting a while.

I don't think they are trying to catch 'em all like some sort of human Pokemon, it sounds like they are instead simply making an effort to interview instead of automatically rejecting those who may have no otherwise been interviewed.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#454

Post by seti0Cha » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:57 PM UTC

oppositelock wrote: post #130

nabaraz wrote: post #67

During 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…

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…

I'm in my 50s and haven't seen it in that overt form. Maybe a silicon valley thing? I've only worked on the east coast. On the other hand, I have missed out on jobs because of culture fit concerns that have an age component: I'm not sensitive enough. Not mean, but not as...nurturing?...as companies seem to now expect. Things were definitely more rough and tumble when I got into this field and I really do prefer that, so I can't deny, I don't fit into modern company cultures as well.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#455

Post by weatherlite » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:57 PM UTC

mech422 wrote: post #398

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have gotten older, my pay has continued to increase. "Over qualified" means that I want too much money . (I don't apologize for that. I bring more value than I did 20 years ago. Either you have a use for that - enough of a use that you're willing to pay for it - or you don't.) Also, if you've got someone with 20 years experience, and they're willing to accept the same pay as someone with 5 years experience... ar…

>>Either you have a use for that - enough of a use that you're willing to pay for it - or you don't. I think this is the crux of a lot of it. You only need one lead/rockstar/ninja/10x* for every 10-20 'developers'. And, as you said, there is always the fear they will leave tomorrow for 2x the money... *) I wanna see 'evil genius' next! :-)

> I think this is the crux of a lot of it. You only need one lead/rockstar/ninja/10x* for every 10-20 'developers'

I really disagree, ideally you'd have at least one in every team.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#456

Post by filoleg » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

ponow wrote: post #320

bendbro wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there is ageism from younger devs, but be sure not to confuse it with respect. In my experience, younger devs (like me at the time) were always excited to learn from older devs.

But what if that older dev is only at par with the younger one: will she or he be treated equally, if everything else was equal? In other words, is an old person expected to compensate for her or his lack of youth by an excess of wisdom?

If the older dev is compensated more/has a higher level position, they are expected to provide more to the employer/product, whether it is through their excess wisdom or knowledge or responsibilities or otherwise.

They shouldn't be expected to compensate for their lack of youth in any way, as youth isn't a metric that has any relevance to their work in software development. And if they are of the same title/total comp as the young dev, there is nothing wrong with them being on par in terms of skills/knowledge/responsibilities.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#457

Post by TulliusCicero » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

anon867 wrote: post #74

rubyist5eva wrote: post #41

At my last company all hands, our CFO was talking about "increasing diversity" at our company. The entire C-Level or our entire company are people of colour. 4 out of 5 department heads are PoC. Customer success team are majority PoC and mostly women. Out of our entire engineering department, there are only 2 "white" people - myself (anglo-Canadian), and another man of Swedish ethnicity..though I suppose all white me…

> Engineering is the only male dominated department, we used to have a few women developers but they left for better opportunities and hiring is currently frozen. Other than C-level, what's the best-paid department/position in a tech company? Food for thought, if you were take the total of money paid to men vs women in your company, and really think hard about it, how would that balance out? Even if you took C-suite,…

> Other than C-level, what's the best-paid department/position in a tech company?

Vice presidents?

Or if you're excluding people management positions, I'd say probably product managers?

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#458

Post by ponow » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #168

s_tec wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP, but I'll bite. For many species, males have a higher standard deviation across a variety factors. There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten. Nature can experiment more with males simply because the stakes are lower, and sometimes those e…

> There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten. Note that birds do not have mammalian sex chromosomes - males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds. So there is not really a biological reason as y…

If we can repeatedly find differences in variance despite similarity of mean for different sexes within a species or other groupings, then that would be a kind of thing that would be reported in biology research.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#459

Post by Spivak » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

sdsaga12 wrote: post #306

JCM9 wrote: post #184

There are very concerning patterns developing at the moment in the DEI space. DEI efforts, and often those leading them, are increasingly the most biased and close minded parts of the organization. Spreading selected stereotypes and often solving concerns about “discrimination” by being very biased and inequitable. For example at my last company a report showed that slightly fewer of a certain minority were promoted.…

Hear hear. If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity, you are operating within a prejudicial, small-minded, small-hearted, and regressive framework. If you belive the most salient details about a person can be read from their appearance, you are a bigot. This cuts every which way, but many want to pretend it's not true for their own biases. This includes seeing someone with blue hair and a p…

> If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity

Viewpoint diversity is already included, that's the whole "capitalist take" for why diversity is good for business. With enough different viewpoints informed by different life experiences you uncover solutions to problems a heterogeneous group wouldn't have thought of. So obviously it's not even an issue, right? This is already something that's already done. Well no, because "you know what I mean" -- the literal phrase viewpoint diversity as it's applied in real life is a dog whistle designed to dress up "people don't want to work with the guy who thinks his bigoted takes are just alternative views" in words that the "blue tribe" uses. You people like diversity, right?

> if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept

Look, if you or people who know are actually getting discriminated against because of camo, boots, pickup trucks, hunting as a hobby, or wanting lower taxes. that's just straight up prejudice. Working in the midwest that kind of thing would be crazy since that's like half my coworkers. But again, in real life these kinds of thing only come up when the subtext is "you call yourself tolerant but don't tolerate my intolerance, you hypocrite!"

No doubt I'm sure there will be plenty of disagreement abound in this thread, so to make the discussion easier can we please make the abstract more concrete. I am sincerely open to being way off base so please hit me with all your personal experiences and the views that haven't been tolerated. I am primed and ready to be righteously mad on y'all's behalf.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#460

Post by Damogran6 » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

oslsla wrote: post #106

jrsj wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still not much is being done to help them in practice. There’s a deep culture of classism in American corporations which these initiatives completely ignore, so the people who really need help and more opportunities don’t get much.

Most women leave the startup space regardless due to the sacrifices required by the system. It's the same with men but less so due to the cultural norms in American culture. This also applies to corporations. The lack of childcare leads to the inevitability as families are forced to decide who needs to stay at home to take care of their offspring. Typically it's the women as we condition them to take jobs with lower…

My wife worked for a permanent-part time placement firm...it's 'contract', 4 days a week, 6 hours a day. She was able to send the kids off to school and be there when they got back and continued to have a Programmer/SQL job with no gaps in her resume.

When the kids were old enough to not need it...she stayed in that position. The extra time lets her volunteer and it's been a pretty awesome arrangement.