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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

#291

Post by hnick »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #268
hnick wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with you, but such smart and resourceful companies could do something about it. They are not powerless. Companies used to train internally - watch an older TV show (or even something like Better Call Saul) and see how many characters "worked their way up from the mail room". The death of company loyalty goes both ways but I'm sure it can be mended with some effort. Where I work one of the better pro…

Pretty sure this constitutes illegal discrimination under US law?

What does?

Australia BTW.

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

#292

Post by AdrianB1 »

romwell wrote: post #194
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…

This is a strawman argument. The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things. It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that…

Why is 50% the useful number? Why not 25 or 40 or 60 or 75%? Any number needs a justification, 25% or 75% alike, so why 50%? We have 80% females in the marketing department and it is actually much larger than the IT department. Should we have 50%? Why? Actually we have a pipeline problem there too, not so many males interested in marketing. Is that a problem that needs to be solved?

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

#293

Post by belorn »

scythe wrote: post #232

To me the question is not why this statistic looks a certain way, but what is the actual experience of women in software engineering. And if you ask women, the problem doesn’t usually seem to be getting hired. It’s the work environment that is alienating. So if you want a number to target, it’s not a proportion of female employees, it’s the retention rate. And that’s not affected by pipeline problems.

This is a pretty old and well established research fact: For most people being a minority in any environment feels alienating.

The problem look very similar if you want male employees in a female dominate work place or female employees in a male dominated work place. Retention rate is going to be problem, and it is going to be a consistent problem from the first year as a student to 30 years later into the career.

The common result is that people move into local groups where they can be part of a majority. Male teachers going into physical education where most the other physical education teachers are also male. In IT we see female programmers go into design or team leader, where most other designers and team leaders are female.

It is a very hard problem to solve.

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

#294

Post by btilly »

fzeroracer wrote: post #242
btilly wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said engineering, and I meant engineering. Not computer science. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-de... to verify that in 2016, just under 21% of engineering degrees were given to women. The figures for the mid 1980s were almost the same. But if you can find figures, in the mid-1960s, engineering degrees were almost exclusively given to men. The ratios have been fairly constant in recen…

My point was that this article is specifically using the term engineering in the sense of computer science. Using engineering as a whole is misleading because as I have demonstrated, software engineering had a historically larger amount of women which faced a decline post-80s. It's burying the lede to make a point about something as a whole rather than the specifics of the article. Also, your point about those langua…

Also, your point about those language features being harder is also, objectively wrong. All of those features you mentioned existed before the 80s and were used at the time.

Existed, yes. Widely used? That was a period of transition!

The period from the early 1980s to the late 1980s coincided with a host of changes. Including the rise of personal PCs and Unix, less VMS and mainframes, a decline in COBOL, a rise in C and Pascal, etc, etc, etc.

In 1980 it was reasonable to take introductory programming courses in COBOL (the most commonly used language in business) or FORTRAN (the most commonly used language in science). At the time neither language supported recursion, closures, or object oriented programming. Pointers existed, but were not as heavily used as they were later. That cohort graduated 37.1% women in 1984.

If you were taking your introductory programming course in 1986 on a personal computer in C or Pascal, you would have dealt with both recursion and pointers heavily. That was about when I took that course. This cohort graduated 29.9% women.

Object oriented programming didn't break into the mainstream until the 1990s. (The original Code Complete written in the 1980s doesn't even mention it.) It existed, but was not widely adopted "by industry".

Closures began to spread out from Scheme but remained a fairly niche concept until people got serious about them in JavaScript in the 2000s.

So the timeline is not evidence against my suspicion.

Of course so many other things were in flux that it isn't evidence for either.

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

#295

Post by age_bronze »

jodrellblank wrote: post #285
age_bronze wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten used to the reeking smell of envy all my life. I was always encouraged by everyone to 'still be nice to them', to try to appease them, etc. It never, ever, and will never, work. I've had enough of that and decided and realized that the best way to deal with envy, is to stick it to them. Hit them as hard as you can with the reality. Even when it hurts them. Hurt them with the facts of how much you're bette…

Or how about they hit you with the reality that most of success is luck? https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol... > In general [in the simulation], mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives. But hey, even if you…

It's not about me thinking I'm successful, because I don't. It's about not giving envious people the positive feedback they desire so much from their corrupt behavior. It's about getting them so hurt they will never again consider coping with their insecurities by transference.

If you've never felt like you need to justify your 'success' (even tho you never felt like it isn't a big deal) to envious people in disguise you'll never understand. It is the most frustratingly impossible task. They can't and will never separate you as an individual from the negative emotion of envy they feel.

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

#296

Post by kelnos »

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.

How many aspects of the differing realities are due to inherent biological differences, and how many are due to societal environment, though?

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

#297

Post by oh_sigh »

shkkmo wrote: post #290
oh_sigh wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the weirdness of these equality crusaders defining what white males are doing as the norm, and as the world should be, and trying to make other groups more like white males in certain respects. What if the rate at which women enter, say, CS, relative to other fields is actaully the "correct" rate, and the male population's numbers are inflated for some bad reason?

The article points that specific entry points into the field are more biased than others. If you stop gatekeeping on these biased entry points, you will end up with a much more diverse workforce that correctly represents this "correct rate" rather than the biases of the industry.

I'm not speaking specifically - clearly, sexism exists, and it has the effect of keeping some people away from a field who would otherwise join, or driving some people away from a field they would otherwise stay in. My point is that using white males as a baseline of the way the world should be is flawed.

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

#298

Post by wsy »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #249
shadowgovt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The concept that men and women may have different interests is considered sexist The concept that men and women may have different interests due to biological differences is extremely sexist, yes. For all the sources Damore cited, there's an entire body of academic work (and an entire cultural revolution in the United States spanning upwards of a century) to the contrary on that topic specifically. A large chunk of…

Actually any psychologist can contradict you easily. If you find arguments like "men are on average taller and heavier than women" to be sexist, you have a wrong sense of what sexism is.

Your examples are not related to software engineering. Please name software engineering related biological differences between men and women, backed by solid scientific studies.

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

#299

Post by btilly »

lordnacho wrote: post #209
btilly wrote: post #27

I know it is not politically correct to say it, but I remain unconvinced that gender parity is a desirable goal. Particularly given the current state of research into differences in gender averages. Here is a real example. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#... men have about a one standard deviation advantage in spacial reasoning over women. Assuming that both distributions are normal wi…

But unlike say basketball or other sports, there's no one thing that makes you better at engineering. Why spatial reasoning? I did engineering and what spatial reasoning is there? Maybe a few vector calculus courses, and some mechanics. A lot is a bunch of equations. There's also an argument that you can make up for a lack of skill by either spending more time, or for instance by recasting problems from one domain to…

My wife's anecdotal experience as an engineering student at CalTech may be instructive.

She is very smart, but her spatial reasoning is weak. At first this wasn't too hard for her, but it became a real issue in lab courses. Then she discovered that CS courses qualified as lab courses and were easy for her. So she got her degree, then became a programmer.

So the answer that I give to you is that as soon as you actually have to any part of engineering that involves actually dealing with how physical stuff works in practice, spatial reasoning comes into play. And dealing with how physical stuff works in practice is pretty much core to being an engineer.

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

#300

Post by huherto »

shadowgovt wrote: post #201
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…

I wish I knew what to do to help ameliorate the anxieties you've experienced, because as the white guy giving the interviews, I'm terrified that something about my approach or demeanor is enhancing those anxieties in my candidates (and I've seen entirely too many promising candidates wash out where I had to put as my feedback "I think they can do this, but they couldn't do it during the interview, and I suspect they…

Hispanic here. I interviewed with Google and I did terribly bad. I was surprised how nice and patient my interviewer was. There is a lot of self imposed pressure as this is Google. I felt the interview went from 0 to 60MPh really fast. My mind was blocked instantly. I also needed to study specifically for this. It seems that on the job experience is not enough. You really need to train for it.
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