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We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

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Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#111

Post by TeMPOraL »

ajross wrote: post #108
TeMPOraL wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misreporting the very link you quoted. Indeed, the Wikipedia description is pretty fair. I'll quote the relevant paragraph directly: "James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback.[2] The memo was written on a flight to China.[12][13] Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is e…

Sorry, how are these two arguments equivalent in your mind: 1. There are few women engineers at Google because there are few candidates in the pipeline. 2. women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism I don't see that at all. The only way you get there is to assume a common causality. But that assumption (that some people ar…

The argument is: because of 2), less women enter the pipeline that leads to a job that's less social and more about things, relative to other occupations, therefore 1).

2) is presented here as a plausible explanation of 1). The connection is very clear, so the validity of that view depends entirely on the validity of point 2) itself. Damore presented a boatload of links to research supporting that point, and plenty of other people did too. See e.g. SSC's take on it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge....

Now one big aspect of the whole drama is that 2) is being rejected out of hand as offensive wrongthink. The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist, and instead a narrative of systemic oppression is proposed. Another big issue with the memo is that a lot of people couldn't - and a lot still can't - understand the fundamental concept that you cannot take population-level statistics and use them to pass judgements on individuals. Just because a certain population doesn't like X on average, does not mean that a particular member of that population currently doing X is somehow wrong or unsuitable because of that. Damore didn't make this mistake, but was widely accused of it (and from what I remember from reading the memo two years ago, he repeatedly warned the readers against making this mistake).

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#112

Post by gusmd »

burfog wrote: post #87
ergfdgs wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow Latin American, I find "LatinX" offensive. English already has a gender neutral adjective to refer to us, Latin, and therefore Latin American. LatinX means you've internalized the colonialization of white "liberals" [0] who would refer to us as Latinos or Latinas while speaking English to show off their poor Spanish and therefore pretend to be sophisticated and woke. [0] I don't consider liberal bad or go…

Oh yes. Hispanic is the correct term when speaking English. Latinx is a sign of wanting to show off Spanish (to virtue signal) but actually being intolerant of the way the language works. Values collided, and thus Latinx was born. Using the correct term, Hispanic, just wasn't an option.

As a Brazilian Latin American, there's nothing Hispanic about me or my people. Most of us are some mixture of European (primarily Italian or Portuguese), African, indian (as in the native people of South America) descendents. Our official language is Portuguese.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#113

Post by gotoeleven »

ajross wrote: post #110
gotoeleven wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should look at the memo with all its links to papers to decide if these claims are "largely unsourced." https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I... There was a version initially floating around that had all the links removed.

There is absolutely no sourcing for research showing women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science. None. He had a bunch of links to studies about bland stuff like personality differences, using them to make arguments the study authors never indended and (where asked) refused to support. Calling that "sourcing" is essentially trying to treat Damore's fundamentally political document as an origi…

"women being inherently or unfixably uninterested in computer science" is not the claim. Do you grok the part where he talks about distributions?

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#114

Post by hinkley »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109
hinkley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if you give a rocket engineer the job of opening a pickle jar, you are forever in danger of them doing something titanically ornate, instead of just opening the goddamn jar or installing one of those toothy wedges under a cabinet near the fridge, where people can still function normally if they forget it's even there. The one time I worked on a team of all highly senior people you couldn't get any…

> If you aren't constantly trying to make 90% of the tasks simple enough for a boring team member to do then I don't know how you prevent the overall complexity of the system from eventually swamping you all. One has to keep in mind that the things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Otherwise, you risk ending up with the stereotypical low-skill Java Enterprise shop, where inexperienced and not particula…

Yes, and for me the happy ratio is around a 90:10 split.

There is a time and place for really sophisticated code, and people will just have to expend some effort to understand its behavior at least, if not in fact how it accomplishes it. If that's leaking throughout the system then it's likely a code smell.

I'd like to reiterate that the statement you quoted was made in the active voice. It's a process. As you add things to the system you should be looking at all of the pain points around it and amortizing the cost of addressing those issues. If you don't arrive there around the time the system begins to gel, but before calcification, you will never arrive. But if you try to get there from day one, you'll pick the wrong priorities and you'll certainly end up in that Enterprise hell you mention.

What I see happen is that people grow with the project, memorizing one thing after another without ever appreciating the weight of it all, and then one day they have to hire more people because someone left, and all of a sudden they're terrified of letting that person do any real work. Because how could they know? Absolutely no effort has been expended setting new people up for success, and the token efforts feel more like sabotage than help. Then it takes years of their lives to memorize all the same stuff and really, I believe you should be investing that time in something more worthwhile. I'm living through that again and it's every bit as bad as I remembered.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#115

Post by DoreenMichele »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #111
ajross wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, how are these two arguments equivalent in your mind: 1. There are few women engineers at Google because there are few candidates in the pipeline. 2. women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism I don't see that at all. The only way you get there is to assume a common causality. But that assumption (that some people ar…

The argument is: because of 2), less women enter the pipeline that leads to a job that's less social and more about things, relative to other occupations, therefore 1). 2) is presented here as a plausible explanation of 1). The connection is very clear, so the validity of that view depends entirely on the validity of point 2) itself. Damore presented a boatload of links to research supporting that point, and plenty o…

The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist

I would posit that men and women have different realities, thus different needs. This shapes interests.

It's not wholly unassailable, but needs to be approached differently than goals like "achieve x percentage of women in tech" are typically approached.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

hinkley wrote: post #114
TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you aren't constantly trying to make 90% of the tasks simple enough for a boring team member to do then I don't know how you prevent the overall complexity of the system from eventually swamping you all. One has to keep in mind that the things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Otherwise, you risk ending up with the stereotypical low-skill Java Enterprise shop, where inexperienced and not particula…

Yes, and for me the happy ratio is around a 90:10 split. There is a time and place for really sophisticated code, and people will just have to expend some effort to understand its behavior at least, if not in fact how it accomplishes it. If that's leaking throughout the system then it's likely a code smell. I'd like to reiterate that the statement you quoted was made in the active voice. It's a process. As you add th…

Thank you for elaborating. What you wrote resonates very strongly, it's essentially the way it's been in every job I worked on. Hell, I'm guilty of it myself - once I have my own fiefdom in the codebase, I feel terrified of letting someone else work in it. In my mind, I have the vision of them struggling unproductively because they lack the knowledge about all the tiny little idiosyncrasies, of various design decisions that were never documented, etc. I recognize this is a wrong state of things, but it's hard to fix.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#117

Post by charliesharding »

sbilstein wrote: post #102
charliesharding wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just having a 'racist' feeling doesn't make someone racist. I would argue that that is exactly what racism is. It's having an irrational feeling towards someone and assuming they have characteristics based solely on their race. Why is it so hard to judge people on a case-by-case basis? By your own admission you say that these personal anxieties are irrational and then you go on to attribute it to being a minority.…

False dichotomy. Some people may feel the weight of group membership more than others. Just cause group membership is the cause does not imply there is no personal solution. It’s both. I’m not gonna solve this for everyone but I can solve it for myself. It’s stupid to ignore my upbringing and blame it instead on just personal failure.

Group membership is not the cause.. that's exactly the kind of reasoning that leads to racism. The cause is you believing your identity comes first from being a member of a group rather than being an individual first.

No group dictates the characteristics of the individuals in that group. Instead, the emergent quality of individuals that belong to a group can give that group a stereotype. However, being the unique individual that you know you are, you're capable of shattering any and all of those stereotypes! You're right that you can solve it for yourself; focus on that opportunity/growth mindset! Don't let anyone tell you how you should think/act because of your group "membership"

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#118

Post by plughs »

sbilstein wrote: post #2

I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs. After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating…

> it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing.

I get it. Interviewers still think they should evaluate how a candidate will "fit into our culture" without any examination of what that means. For a lot of teams that still translates to "same shows, same games, same fondness for happy hours, same comfort for vaguely inappropriate jokes". If a candidate doesn't seem to fit into that sort of "culture", it's easy to pass them over for the next one.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#119

Post by VRay »

rofo1 wrote: post #33

I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Be it women, or black, or whatever. Why? Why can't you just hire the right person for the job? To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups of people. Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn't make sense, that's not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end up doing i…

Look into "unconscious biases"

Basically, someone similar to you will naturally seem like a better and more skilled person

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#120

Post by TeMPOraL »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #115
TeMPOraL wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is: because of 2), less women enter the pipeline that leads to a job that's less social and more about things, relative to other occupations, therefore 1). 2) is presented here as a plausible explanation of 1). The connection is very clear, so the validity of that view depends entirely on the validity of point 2) itself. Damore presented a boatload of links to research supporting that point, and plenty o…

The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist I would posit that men and women have different realities, thus different needs. This shapes interests. It's not wholly unassailable, but needs to be approached differently than goals like "achieve x percentage of women in tech" are typically approached.

I'd agree with your observation about different realities, and I think it's woefully underappreciated. I think it only truly clicked with me once I entered a stable, long-term relationship with my now wife - which made me immersed in the daily minutiae of a woman's life, the stories, the perspectives, the concerns, the emotions. It's something that's hard to learn from just brief, casual interactions, no matter how open-minded one is.

Personally, I feel the issue of gender balance in tech is approached completely wrong from every direction. The goal should be to give opportunity for anyone who wants to join and excel in the field, and to let them feel comfortable and safe in it. But the topic became a battleground for interest groups that demand fixed ratios and discrimination in their own favor, and there's also the strong confounding factor of money - IT is currently one of the easiest, if not the easiest, way to make lots of money with little training and up-front investment, so the media spotlight is focused on tech (vs. other occupations).

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