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

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

#631

Post by zelphirkalt »

oppositelock wrote: post #279
jbluepolarbear wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

About algorithms: It very much depends on the thing one works on, whether one ever needs to look up what a good algorithm is for a problem, which needs solving. Often it is more about how to put pieces together, using APIs, building an API, making a service, etc. Similar for data structures. For most you only need to know the basics like when to use a hash table, when to use an array or whatever of the data structures that are often available anyway in the standard library of the language.

This even more diminishes the gains that engineers get from their expert knowledge.

Usually only when in a position to develop something ground up, does the expert knowledge of data structures and algorithms come into play.

Algorithm and data structure questionaires rather seem like mathematics in many cases. A filter to weed out people, but not often of use at the job.

Obviously I might be biased due to personal experience.

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

#632

Post by zelphirkalt »

oaiey wrote: post #508
oppositelock wrote: post #130

Earlier 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…

Recognizing seniority is hard. Computer Science is a field were a teenager in front of a computer quickly feels like a god. You can do anything! But getting that out of their thinking takes time. And that is IMHO what you experience. It is disheartening that they lack the respect they should have socially independent of profession for an "elder" person. I am in my early 40s as an architect arguing with our mixed-age…

I think part of the reason for feeling like a know-all can-do-everything in junior years and afterwards as well is, because of not reading the right books. I am talking about really good books about the core competence of programming. I have read books authored by people with more than 50y of experience. The ideas and wisdom they come up with is unparalleled. Reading about such great ideas and how to avoid issues with code makes me feel like: "Woa that is sooo neat and clean! Why did I not get that idea myself?" and there you have the humbling experience, that should introduce respect for seniority.

Of course it is not a blanket. A senior should adapt to new ways as well, if they make sense. For example functional constructs have become more popular in recent years. Just because one is a senior, does not mean, that they should go on writing their sequential do-while loops (usually it would be for loops, but exaggerating here), when things could be written with multicore in mind and using map reduce style. That is not seniority, it is lack of self-education and development of ones skills. No need to join the web framework churn either though. One should understand their essence though.

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

#633

Post by yodsanklai »

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…

My company appears to be extremely concerned with discrimination and inclusion. Been there less than a year, and I had already three trainings on the topic.

The emphasis is very clearly on certain minorities. There's not a single "senior" on the training material videos/pictures and the issue of ageism is barely mentioned. There's clearly no will to hire older employees. I wonder what I could do about this at my level. I'm 45+ and already feel out of place and just "tolerated", don't want to raise any attention on me.

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

#634

Post by randomsearch »

pvarangot wrote: post #591
forinti wrote: post #265

I've worked in a predominantly female team and there was discrimination against, well, me. I've worked in a team with lots of older folks and the younger members weren't taken as seriously as they should have been. It also happens when a company has lots of outsourced programmers. I think there is a lot of emphasis on discrimination made by young white men because they simply are the largest demographic in IT and, of…

Yeah Unconscious Bias training is one of the DEI policies that I think is valuable to everyone, that's if it's training and not indoctrination.

Is there rigorous evidence that supports the idea of unconscious bias and the effectiveness of training in reducing it? I’ve seen it advertised in academia and wondered if it’s evidence-based.

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

#635

Post by AdrianB1 »

Jabbles wrote: post #630
SamReidHughes wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is obviously garbage statistics, isn't it? The conclusion they've drawn about the female distribution is based entirely on the performance of one female player. And they're obfuscating rank ordering with rating gap. Also, for an unexplained reason, they only consider Indian players. That's weird, isn't it? Why Indian? Let's investigate. Using the Oct 20th 2020 data, since the Oct 6th 2020 data isn't available on…

You seem passionate about proving something but I can't tell what it is.

> intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end

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

#636

Post by ok123456 »

pvarangot wrote: post #591
forinti wrote: post #265

I've worked in a predominantly female team and there was discrimination against, well, me. I've worked in a team with lots of older folks and the younger members weren't taken as seriously as they should have been. It also happens when a company has lots of outsourced programmers. I think there is a lot of emphasis on discrimination made by young white men because they simply are the largest demographic in IT and, of…

Yeah Unconscious Bias training is one of the DEI policies that I think is valuable to everyone, that's if it's training and not indoctrination.

It's a form of 'original sin'. It's valuable as a form of control, but it's flimsy science---indistinguishable from the null-hypothesis.

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

#638

Post by AdrianB1 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #382
fallingknife wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'll be voting Republican

I'm not American, so I'm not as deep into the exact political party differences, but why do you think that's the solution?

Based on what I see from across the ocean, USA politics is binary: only 2 choices, parties have opposing opinions on almost everything. One is pushing DEI, one is opposing.

The worst thing is that based on what I see from outside, both sides have something right and something really wrong, so there is no good choice overall. It does not matter who wins the elections, something will be worse.

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

#639

Post by AdrianB1 »

cafeoh wrote: post #325
ghufran_syed wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amazing that you think this kind of blatant racism is acceptable - what does being “white” have to do with his behavior or performance? or do you think certain skin colors are limited in their abilities and performance?

More amazing yet, perhaps, is that some people find it acceptable to talk about racism in a situation where the word doesn't apply. Discrimination against white people can be a thing, racism doesn't. Discrimination can make sense (for obvious reasons), racism doesn't.

Discrimination based on race is racism, so your argument makes no sense.

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

#640

Post by AdrianB1 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #403
nostromo wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating two issues: discrimination and self-selection. Discrimination is never ok. If a woman applies to a job as a developer, she should absolutely not be discriminated against because of her gender. Self-selection is always ok. If women in aggregate are more interested in biology than computer science, that is fine. This paper is evidence of discrimination, not self-selection.

> If women in aggregate are more interested in biology than computer science, that is fine. Do you think there is something innate in women that makes them less interested in computer science? Personally I find that extremely unlikely. The only other explanation for why they would self-select away from tech is that they feel they're being told to. That might be fine by you, but I think it's a problem.

There are several differences in interests between sexes, just google for studies and you will find plenty. It is a fact, not extremely unlikely.
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