We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by jalgos_eminator » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:31 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #128

Honestly for young children I wouldn't want any of the girls to become software engineers. Most Software Engineers including myself are friendly but also grumpy, nerdy and annoying, with poor communication skills and an unhealthy lifestyle. For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment - esp one without developers in it.…

Counterpoint: If not you, then who? Your daughters could be part of a cultural shift with respect to the tech workplace, so why discourage them?

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

#142

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:32 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #131

tasogare wrote: post #52

Collective madness is largely reached at this point: the writer is complaining about a totally self-made issue. If I was trying to recruit men for nurse jobs, or people of color in Korea I would ran in a similar pipeline problem. The real issue is that "diversity" had became a metrics to reach for its own sake by companies instead of simply recruiting people that fit the job. Moreover, you can’t complain about so-cal…

The desire for diversity is not for its own sake. Recruiting people that 'fit the job' leads to a mono-culture. Besides being unfair, this is bad for companies. It means you get collective blind-spots, collective hype-trains. Moreover, you reduce the effective hiring pool. Because, if you have a mono-culture then there is significant disruption to adding things outside the mono-culture. This reduction in the hiring p…

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by TurkishPoptart » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #131

tasogare wrote: post #52

Collective madness is largely reached at this point: the writer is complaining about a totally self-made issue. If I was trying to recruit men for nurse jobs, or people of color in Korea I would ran in a similar pipeline problem. The real issue is that "diversity" had became a metrics to reach for its own sake by companies instead of simply recruiting people that fit the job. Moreover, you can’t complain about so-cal…

The desire for diversity is not for its own sake. Recruiting people that 'fit the job' leads to a mono-culture. Besides being unfair, this is bad for companies. It means you get collective blind-spots, collective hype-trains. Moreover, you reduce the effective hiring pool. Because, if you have a mono-culture then there is significant disruption to adding things outside the mono-culture. This reduction in the hiring p…

While we're at it, can we stop using the word Caucasian to talk about white people?[0] It's completely historically and factually inaccurate. Unless you're talking about Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Dagestanis, Chechens, etc. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples_of_the_Caucasus

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

#144

Post by asdff » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

sbilstein wrote: post #42

travisoneill1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe you are openly racist enough to claim that interviews are unfair because you have to be interviewed by white people (who you would have to work with every day if you were hired). If I said that I was uncomfortable being interviewed by latinos what do you think the reaction would be?

That's not at all what I said. I related a very personal set of anxieties (largely irrational) that I feel as a minority. Plenty of white people are uncomfortable around minorities. Do they all love that feeling? I'm confident most feel intense guilt about it and never act on those impulses in any way. Just having a 'racist' feeling doesn't make someone racist.

>Plenty of white people are uncomfortable around minorities.

Pretty glaring assumption there.

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

#145

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

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…

Torvalds is Finnish

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

#146

Post by TurkishPoptart » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

tasogare wrote: post #52

Collective madness is largely reached at this point: the writer is complaining about a totally self-made issue. If I was trying to recruit men for nurse jobs, or people of color in Korea I would ran in a similar pipeline problem. The real issue is that "diversity" had became a metrics to reach for its own sake by companies instead of simply recruiting people that fit the job. Moreover, you can’t complain about so-cal…

What these people are arguing on behalf of is affirmative action, and the end result has been white people having to tip-toe around each other in order to not seen like bigots to other white people.

Ironically, most people of color I've met find this all to be quite silly - they are professionals in their career, and want to be treated as such.

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

#147

Post by skybrian » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

sbilstein wrote: post #53

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white g…

In my experience, making an interview less biased is not about color of skin. It's about comfort and acknowledging how these anxieties creep up. At big companies I've worked at, we coached interviewers to do at least 5 minutes of small talk and resume review, to smile, to always leave time for questions at the end, to show some amount of enthusiasm for the work the interviewee is doing. It's not about an interview fo…

When I was at Google, interviewing was considered everybody's job, but without any particular benefit from doing them. They'd just try to guilt you into doing them. (I think they'd try to guilt some people harder than others, though.)

I think this is a mistake. Interviewing is a teaching/sales role and many people need coaching to come across as friendly. They aren't going to get that coaching if they see it primarily as an obligation.

I did them for many years out of a feeling of obligation, but if I got better at it, it was slowly, and with diminishing returns. It was just more of the same experience.

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

#148

Post by abjKT26nO8 » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #135

jdmoreira wrote: post #15

at my workplace we try very hard to hire women programmers and we are at about 10% - 15% which is still quite low but better than other companies around us. At the same time I noticed that the majority of engineering managers, product owners and agile coaches in our company are women. Some of these women were programmers at some point in their career. I'm not deducing anything from this (especially since it’s a singl…

My suspicion is that the pipeline has fewer women, partly because they leave Engineering so quickly. Thus there are hardly any experienced women in the pipeline. Since an Engineer may change jobs half a dozen times over a career, but women generally change once (to non-Engineering job) we have a cumulative effect.

> Since an Engineer may change jobs half a dozen times over a career, but women generally change once (to non-Engineering job) we have a cumulative effect.

I don't understand this reasoning. Are you saying that women generally have one engineering job and then they change to a non-engineering one? If not, where is the number difference coming from?

Off-topic: why do you capitalize "engineering"?

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

#149

Post by kaikai » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

HeroOfAges wrote: post #122

majos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone who didn't read the linked article (it's short), it suggests that a key element is careful design of intro courses. Students with computer science experience get a more advanced course that is explicitly designed not to make them more competitive in second-year courses (instead, it starts on material that will re-appear in third-year courses). Students with no computer science experience get their own intr…

How does this level the playing field? Why would this not reduce the overall rate of learning for everyone to suit the needs of the slowest students?

Inexperience doesn't equal unintelligence. Making sure that your intro class structure supports people with varying experience levels means you're more likely to engage people with the right interest and capabilities, not less so.

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

#150

Post by abjKT26nO8 » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

seangrogg wrote: post #20

I'll preface this with the usual "my views are my own" but I do think that diversity in the workplace is a very deep and interesting problem and that we do a major disservice to it by creating ridiculous metrics. I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender; "We aim to have 50% women in the workplace" is a prime example of this. If this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is…

The companies, I've worked at so far, had 0 female software engineers. I'm not even looking at percentages. It's horrible.