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Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

theverge.com

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Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#11

Post by accountyaccount »

martin1b wrote: post #7
deelowe wrote: post #5

Can't read the linked article. Did the study look further into the gender bias assumptions beyond the simple female vs male statistic (e.g by anonymizing code submissions)?

Exactly. Maybe the code needed to be rejected. Many developers have no problem pointing out issues in code. Anyone's code. You can see it daily on stackoverflow. Just because it happens to be a female from time to time makes it newsworthy.

It means it's worth looking into... which is what they're doing. They also discovered the code is more often from more junior developers, which leads to an investigation of whether or not women are having a harder time being promoted or are leaving the company more often.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#12

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

tldr This article is terrible.

Maybe this is a "Facebook rejects..." story. Maybe it's a story about how bad Facebook is.

But if you keep reading past the introduction it sure sounds a lot more like a "male engineers reject..." story.

And then if you keep reading some more it sure sounds like a "code is rejected proportionally to engineer seniority..." story, which is not a story.

And then at the very very end, you finally get to the only part of this terrible article that makes any sense:

> the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be.

Facebook talking about itself is the only honestly presented thing on the page.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#13

Post by ybrah »

ch4s3 wrote: post #6
jlebrech wrote: post #3

I think the industry is suffering from the cobra effect right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

Women are more likely to get hired to solve the unequal distribution of female/male engineers. This makes it more likely to have less qualified female engineers, and more qualified male engineers, since hiring requirements for men are more strict. A higher average of under qualified females compared to under qualified male engineers will lead to more code getting reject from the female counterpart.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#14

Post by jjawssd »

ch4s3 wrote: post #6
jlebrech wrote: post #3

I think the industry is suffering from the cobra effect right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

"(...) However, Facebook employees now speculate that Parikh’s findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast as male counterparts who joined the company at the same time, or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted."

> Code rejected due to rank

> Women are of lower rank than men

> We need to promote more women faster

Facebook is about to get a taste of their own medicine.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#15

Post by leshow »

ch4s3 wrote: post #6
jlebrech wrote: post #3

I think the industry is suffering from the cobra effect right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#16

Post by savanaly »

A couple of standout points from this article:

* the data itself hasn't been released so no one outside of Facebook has in any way analyzed it, we're relying on their analysis and reportage of that analysis to be correct

* the rejection rate is not just higher for female engineers, it's a lot higher: 35%

* Facebook is confident that the effect is not due to gender bias (scrutinizing female workers' code more closely) but that it's due to a confounding effect of engineering rank (females tend to be lower rank, and lower ranks tend to have more rejections through some mechanism)

In other words, we definitely need more study in the area before I would be confident drawing any important conclusions. It is a fascinating step forward though.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#17

Post by k__ »

ch4s3 wrote: post #6
jlebrech wrote: post #3

I think the industry is suffering from the cobra effect right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

They wanted more women. Dropped the hiring bar for female devs. Got more mediocre devs. Those got bad reviews. Then they blamed it on sexism, which reduced the women willing to go into tech even more.

-- edit --

I don't know if it went that way or not, it's just an explanation on how their problem would map to the cobra effect.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#18

Post by jlebrech »

leshow wrote: post #15
ch4s3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

I was going to elaborate in my original post, but I like my upvotes.
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