How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#41

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:05 AM UTC

AngryParsley wrote: post #37

jacques_chester wrote: post #31

Imposter syndrome is quite widespread. I first learnt about it from a law academic: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/07/12/imposter-syndrome/ On my office wall hangs my degree -- first class honours from a good university. I still half expect that one day they will ask for it back, that they were just being nice because they like me. My Dad has it bad -- very bad. He has > 50 years experience in his field. He knows m…

That's interesting. Has your dad ever tried partnering with some sort of agent/hustler (I don't know the right term) to do business deals? A confident front-man might be able to sell your dad's expertise to businesses for a pretty penny.

Oh, my mother tried. In her prime she was a formidable people-person, a savvy deal broker. And she pushed Dad very hard to charge more, but he really does have crippling modesty.

Another anecdote. He applied to work in Antarctica, a lifelong dream of his, for ANARE (now the Australian Antarctic Division). His CV listed at that point nearly 40 years of experience working on every major class of communication known to man -- radio, microwave, telephone, fibre optic -- and throughout South East Asia and Russia.

So which position did he apply for?

The junior communications officer.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#42

Post by AngryParsley » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:08 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #41

AngryParsley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. Has your dad ever tried partnering with some sort of agent/hustler (I don't know the right term) to do business deals? A confident front-man might be able to sell your dad's expertise to businesses for a pretty penny.

Oh, my mother tried. In her prime she was a formidable people-person, a savvy deal broker. And she pushed Dad very hard to charge more, but he really does have crippling modesty. Another anecdote. He applied to work in Antarctica, a lifelong dream of his, for ANARE (now the Australian Antarctic Division). His CV listed at that point nearly 40 years of experience working on every major class of communication known to…

I'm sorry, I'm confused. If she was the deal-broker, why didn't she dictate the prices?

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#43

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:11 AM UTC

AngryParsley wrote: post #42

jacques_chester wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, my mother tried. In her prime she was a formidable people-person, a savvy deal broker. And she pushed Dad very hard to charge more, but he really does have crippling modesty. Another anecdote. He applied to work in Antarctica, a lifelong dream of his, for ANARE (now the Australian Antarctic Division). His CV listed at that point nearly 40 years of experience working on every major class of communication known to…

I'm sorry, I'm confused. If she was the deal-broker, why didn't she dictate the prices?

Sometimes you can't get someone to do something they don't want to do.

One of the things about my father that I most admire is his inviolable integrity. He felt that he couldn't morally charge for a lot of what he did and no force on earth, even my mother, could change his decision.

He was wrong, in my opinion. But that's how it was.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#44

Post by masterzora » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:12 AM UTC

jules wrote: post #34

erikpukinskis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them. You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending mon…

> You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to right handed people. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% right handed, then that is money largely spent on recruiting right handed people. Spending money specifically on recruiting left handed people brings the budget to parity. Dividing up the population into two groups using your…

What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.

Why? Just on topic that leaves out two very, very important things:

1. The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men and it will take a nontrivial investment of resources to counter that.

2. Although it wouldn't affect an individual's performance, diversity (and other things that don't affect individual performance) can affect team performance and thus need to be considered.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#45

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:15 AM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #35

nostrademons wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really - there's a really simple solution for hiring more women without dropping the bar for them. Make your company the most desirable place for anyone to work, so that you have vastly more applicants than positions, and then you can pick whoever you want as the incoming cohort. Math: Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 mill…

If you have way more indistinguishable applicants than positions you are paying too much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_wage

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#46

Post by codex » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:21 AM UTC

masterzora wrote: post #36

codex wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this is unfair to particular people. Two students (a man and a woman) walk by the job board for company X. Both of them are ideal for company X, and they would love to work there, but they don't notice the board, so they both take a job at Y for less money and are unhappy. Now, rewind. The situation is the same, but nearby is a recruiter. The man walks by again, not noticing the job board. The recuiter does…

Ah, but remember that in this example everyone sees the posting (or, if you prefer, the recruiter only reaches out to women who see the posting) so your scenario is impossible. The recruiter's role isn't to increase visibility but rather to be a signal to women that they wouldn't be wasting their time with this company. When programs like the one briefly mentioned in the article are done well their net effect is real…

Both of the students are CS majors. They presumably will both eventually work for similar companies. Why would the woman who is equally interested in computer science pass over the job posting, requiring an actual recruiter to be present, when the man does not? Do women get CS degrees and then leave to work in some other field post-graduation, not writing code? If so, that is a huge problem. Do they lose interest in computer science? Do they get sick of the male dominated environment in CS but just stick it out for their degree?

I would hope that the recruiter isn't, in fact, signalling something along the lines of, "your odds of getting hired at this company are greater than your equally talented male friend." If I were receiving that much extra recruiting attention because of my gender, that is the impression I would get.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#47

Post by esrauch » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:26 AM UTC

rdw wrote: post #12

codex wrote: post #8

A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors. For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns. I replied that, if that were their goal, they would…

Do you have evidence that talent can be linearized in such a manner that it is possible to tell objectively within 1% how well an intern will fit at the company? Of course you can linearize on test scores or number of publications or something, but is there evidence that these values will translate precisely to job performance? In my experience, such evidence does not exist, so the zero-sum reasoning is fallacious fr…

I'm interested in your position. I mainly don't agree about the non-zero sum or definite ordering parts (the BigTechCos that I've worked out explicitly stack rank applicants, so that means they do think there is some definite ordering that can at least be approximated), but I don't think that is a really interesting debate to have.

I think more interestingly, it seems like what I've seen is looking to hire interns where we can't even fill the spots we want with people who appear that they are likely to be actually qualified, they hire interns who are unlikely to be qualified because its worth it to filter down to the few that are. It seems that your suggestion that you get more qualified applicants than you have positions for, which really flies in the face of my experiences. Is it really true or were you exaggerating somewhat to make a point?

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#48

Post by NegativeK » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:36 AM UTC

swampthing wrote: post #9

Deeper thoughts aside, what kind of good friend says that to someone?

Everyone says stupid shit now and again, whether it's to a random person on the street, your best friend, or your spouse.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#49

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:38 AM UTC

codex wrote: post #38

nostrademons wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming you can continuously & linearly rank every single applicant. The labor market doesn't work that way. Typically, it's organized into tiers - you have your superstars, and then you have a pool of developers that are good enough, and then you have a bunch of clueless n00bs. Within a tier, it's rare to find significant, measurable performance differences. The studies showed a 10x difference in productivit…

Even if the population is divided into discrete tiers, the process is still rife with unfairness no matter how you dice it. If you have 1,000 slots, 10,000 candidates in your tier, and 1,000 of them are women, you can hire any ratio of women to men that you like and all will be equally talented. Great, right? It's great for those that are hired; not so much for everyone else. Say you make the gender ratio 50%. You hi…

Right, but you're going to get this unfairness no matter what criteria you use, gender or otherwise.

Say you leave the gender ratio unspecified and instead decide based upon the interviewer's gut feeling. Then you'll bias the hiring process toward schmoozers with good social skills.

Or you decide based on which college the applicant went to. Then you bias it towards people who were willing to shell out for a prestigious piece of paper.

Or you decide based on whoever responds to your offer first. Then you bias it against people who have lives and better things to do with their time than refreshing their e-mail waiting for a callback.

Really, the only solution is to acknowledge that life's not fair, and people sometimes get things for completely arbitrary reasons. Which is really hard for a lot of people to do - it was hard for me - but you end up being a lot more successful when you don't think too hard about all the folks who get undeserved job offers and promotions and think more about how you can tilt the odds toward being one of the lucky ones instead.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#50

Post by xibernetik » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:40 AM UTC

I'm a former and returning Microsoft intern, who interviewed in her freshman year. I strongly suspect I got the interview as a result of being female and facing discrimination early on (but not because I was female and they wanted to hire someone of my gender).

Long story short, I'm used to being dismissed or looked over by my male peers - often in CS, but also in the hobbies I've taken up over the years. I found the only way to be listened to or respected was that I had to prove myself very quickly to anyone I had to work with. I got my interview after talking to a Microsoft dev doing recruitment for 10 minutes about a project I worked on after identifying he had a personal interest in that field. He didn't even look at my resume, but I saw him star it when I gave it at the end of our chat.

I would never have been able to do that if I wasn't used to being over-looked. I can signal that I'm competent and easily discuss projects or tech interests within a couple minutes of meeting someone because in the past few years, I've learned that when I neglect to do that, I'm going to get ignored. Because of that, I have an incredibly advantage in that many of my male peers CAN'T do that, simply because they've never had to until it came time to search for a job.

FWIW, one of the biggest reasons I'm returning to Microsoft is that it's one of the few places I've ever felt like I was respected off the bat regardless of age or gender. I couldn't imagine working with most of my peers back in school because of the lack of respect. There are bad apples everywhere, and certain teams are definitely geared towards older folk - but there are highschool kids doing internships there, in some very coveted areas. The guy was out of line, but he's definitely the exception and not the norm.