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

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

#21

Post by accountyaccount »

ybrah wrote: post #13
ch4s3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.

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

#22

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 like your non-bigoted explanation, I wouldn't have expressed it in such a way.

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

#23

Post by cazum »

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?

I believe they meant this in the context of popular gender gap solutions.

More specifically, the situation where pressure is put on teams to weigh gender as more important than skill in the hiring process to bring teams to gender-parity. The result of this is female employees submitting worse code. This isn't because women are inherently any worse at writing software than men are, it's simply that the employer has a smaller pool of talent to pick from.

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

#24

Post by jjawssd »

randomact2452 wrote: post #19

Creating a throwaway since I've taken part of this internal discussion at Facebook. Once normalized for skill level (i.e. junior engineer, engineer, senior engineer) the level of rejection between genders is the same.

Why is your username green?

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

#26

Post by anothercomment »

If anything, they should check the rejected code and verify that it was not worthy of rejection, that is, it really was likely the gender of the submitter that caused the rejection.

If higher rank of coder would make rejection less likely, it would also not bear well on the code reviews.

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

#27

Post by anothercomment »

jjawssd wrote: post #24
randomact2452 wrote: post #19

Creating a throwaway since I've taken part of this internal discussion at Facebook. Once normalized for skill level (i.e. junior engineer, engineer, senior engineer) the level of rejection between genders is the same.

Why is your username green?

Because it is new (throwaway). HN colors new accounts green.

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

#28

Post by 013a »

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)?

I guarantee you that no one in Facebook feels comfortable suggesting that they investigate another possible (not likely, but possible) cause: the code is just worse, on average.

And there could be many reasons for that, beyond just the simplistic "girls are bad at code." Maybe Facebook has a lower bar for hiring female engineers due to affirmative action.

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

#29

Post by scandox »

jjawssd wrote: post #24
randomact2452 wrote: post #19

Creating a throwaway since I've taken part of this internal discussion at Facebook. Once normalized for skill level (i.e. junior engineer, engineer, senior engineer) the level of rejection between genders is the same.

Why is your username green?

Because new accounts are green and his account is a throwaway account which he just created for the purpose of making this single comment.

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

#30

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

randomact2452 wrote: post #19

Creating a throwaway since I've taken part of this internal discussion at Facebook. Once normalized for skill level (i.e. junior engineer, engineer, senior engineer) the level of rejection between genders is the same.

I'd be happier with your statement if you replaced "skill level" with "seniority", because the two aren't really equivalent.
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