How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#31

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:23 AM UTC

Imposter syndrome is quite widespread. I first learnt about it from a law academic: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/07/12/imposter-syndrome/

On my office wall hangs my degree -- first class honours from a good university. I still half expect that one day they will ask for it back, that they were just being nice because they like me.

My Dad has it bad -- very bad. He has > 50 years experience in his field. He knows more about electricity than most electrical engineers. I tried to convince him to join the IEEE; with his experience and knowledge they'd probably bump him up to Senior Member grade quick smart.

Nope. Not good enough.

This can actually be quite crippling -- he used to give away his services rather than charging for them. "Too simple a job, I couldn't possibly charge for it". He was not a successful small businessman, thinking like that.

It takes most of my willpower to ask people for money. Because surely, I'm not that good. Surely.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#32

Post by codex » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:27 AM UTC

masterzora wrote: post #22

pervycreeper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent meant "fairness" to apply on the individual level, rather than on a collective level, I believe. That is, resources expended per candidate would be comparable, rather than having the total sum of resources expended on female candidates be equal to those spent on male candidates (mutatis mutandis: hires, members of the public, etc.). Which is presumably what you mean.

But even resources per candidate isn't a good measure of fairness. Just consider the trivial illustrative possibility of a normal job board posting that every potential candidate sees. In today's world it is likely that more men would respond than women by a nontrivial factor. Everyone who responds receives equal treatment and equal devotion of resources and, in the end, significantly more men are hired than women. N…

Actually, this is unfair to particular people. Two students (a man and a woman) walk by the job board for company X. Both of them are ideal for company X, and they would love to work there, but they don't notice the board, so they both take a job at Y for less money and are unhappy.

Now, rewind. The situation is the same, but nearby is a recruiter. The man walks by again, not noticing the job board. The recuiter does not flag him down. Now the woman walks by and the recruiter walks up to her and interests her in company X. She takes her ideal job and is happy. The man takes a job at company Y, for less pay, and is unhappy.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#33

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:34 AM UTC

codex wrote: post #30

nostrademons wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really - there's a really simple solution for hiring more women without dropping the bar for them. Make your company the most desirable place for anyone to work, so that you have vastly more applicants than positions, and then you can pick whoever you want as the incoming cohort. Math: Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 mill…

The strategy you describe drops the bar for all employees in order to achieve a gender target. This is not how companies operate, for the most part. If a company wants to hire 1,000 people and 10,000 applicants are in the top 1%, they will move the bar up to hire the top 0.1% instead. Given a normal distirbution of applicants, there is a huge difference in talent (10x?) between top 1% and top 0.1%. The bar always aut…

You're assuming you can continuously & linearly rank every single applicant. The labor market doesn't work that way. Typically, it's organized into tiers - you have your superstars, and then you have a pool of developers that are good enough, and then you have a bunch of clueless n00bs. Within a tier, it's rare to find significant, measurable performance differences. The studies showed a 10x difference in productivity between the best teams and the worst teams - that does not mean it applies to individuals, or that it means the best developer is 2x as good as the second best developer, at least on an industry-wide level.

(How would you stack-rank John Resig against Rob Pike? The two of them against Zed Shaw? The three of them against Guido van Rossum? Note also that even if you can stack rank their accomplishments, that won't necessarily reflect in their day-to-day performance. Guido van Rossum wrote Python, but he also wrote a bunch of AppEngine code that isn't all that much beloved.)

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#34

Post by jules » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:39 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #11

codex wrote: post #8

A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors. For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns. I replied that, if that were their goal, they would…

But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them. You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending mon…

> You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to right handed people. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% right handed, then that is money largely spent on recruiting right handed people. Spending money specifically on recruiting left handed people brings the budget to parity.

Dividing up the population into two groups using your favorite method and then demanding that the amount spent on each of the groups is equal is ridiculous. Not only that, but mathematically you almost surely can't even satisfy two people that have that philosophy simultaneously.

What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#35

Post by bradleyjg » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:49 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #25

codex wrote: post #8

A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors. For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns. I replied that, if that were their goal, they would…

Not really - there's a really simple solution for hiring more women without dropping the bar for them. Make your company the most desirable place for anyone to work, so that you have vastly more applicants than positions, and then you can pick whoever you want as the incoming cohort. Math: Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 mill…

If you have way more indistinguishable applicants than positions you are paying too much.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#36

Post by masterzora » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:52 AM UTC

codex wrote: post #32

masterzora wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even resources per candidate isn't a good measure of fairness. Just consider the trivial illustrative possibility of a normal job board posting that every potential candidate sees. In today's world it is likely that more men would respond than women by a nontrivial factor. Everyone who responds receives equal treatment and equal devotion of resources and, in the end, significantly more men are hired than women. N…

Actually, this is unfair to particular people. Two students (a man and a woman) walk by the job board for company X. Both of them are ideal for company X, and they would love to work there, but they don't notice the board, so they both take a job at Y for less money and are unhappy. Now, rewind. The situation is the same, but nearby is a recruiter. The man walks by again, not noticing the job board. The recuiter does…

Ah, but remember that in this example everyone sees the posting (or, if you prefer, the recruiter only reaches out to women who see the posting) so your scenario is impossible. The recruiter's role isn't to increase visibility but rather to be a signal to women that they wouldn't be wasting their time with this company.

When programs like the one briefly mentioned in the article are done well their net effect is really signalling more than anything. As trivial as it sounds, such signalling can actually have a large impact.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#37

Post by AngryParsley » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:52 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #31

Imposter syndrome is quite widespread. I first learnt about it from a law academic: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/07/12/imposter-syndrome/ On my office wall hangs my degree -- first class honours from a good university. I still half expect that one day they will ask for it back, that they were just being nice because they like me. My Dad has it bad -- very bad. He has > 50 years experience in his field. He knows m…

That's interesting. Has your dad ever tried partnering with some sort of agent/hustler (I don't know the right term) to do business deals? A confident front-man might be able to sell your dad's expertise to businesses for a pretty penny.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#38

Post by codex » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:56 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #33

codex wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strategy you describe drops the bar for all employees in order to achieve a gender target. This is not how companies operate, for the most part. If a company wants to hire 1,000 people and 10,000 applicants are in the top 1%, they will move the bar up to hire the top 0.1% instead. Given a normal distirbution of applicants, there is a huge difference in talent (10x?) between top 1% and top 0.1%. The bar always aut…

You're assuming you can continuously & linearly rank every single applicant. The labor market doesn't work that way. Typically, it's organized into tiers - you have your superstars, and then you have a pool of developers that are good enough, and then you have a bunch of clueless n00bs. Within a tier, it's rare to find significant, measurable performance differences. The studies showed a 10x difference in productivit…

Even if the population is divided into discrete tiers, the process is still rife with unfairness no matter how you dice it.

If you have 1,000 slots, 10,000 candidates in your tier, and 1,000 of them are women, you can hire any ratio of women to men that you like and all will be equally talented. Great, right? It's great for those that are hired; not so much for everyone else.

Say you make the gender ratio 50%. You hire 500 women and 500 men from the top tier. Every first-class company like Google or Facebook adopts this strategy. This means that the odds of being hired at a first-class company is 50% for women in the top tier, and only 5% for men in the top tier. For every interview a woman does, a man must do ten. Eventually all the slots in all first-class companies are filled up, leaving some top-tier men working for second class companies--but no top tier women are working for second class companies.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#39

Post by missechokit » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 1:59 AM UTC

AngryParsley wrote: post #37

jacques_chester wrote: post #31

Imposter syndrome is quite widespread. I first learnt about it from a law academic: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/07/12/imposter-syndrome/ On my office wall hangs my degree -- first class honours from a good university. I still half expect that one day they will ask for it back, that they were just being nice because they like me. My Dad has it bad -- very bad. He has > 50 years experience in his field. He knows m…

That's interesting. Has your dad ever tried partnering with some sort of agent/hustler (I don't know the right term) to do business deals? A confident front-man might be able to sell your dad's expertise to businesses for a pretty penny.

It's too bad he can't be his own frontman. I guess that's impostor syndrome for ya?

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#40

Post by esrauch » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 2:02 AM UTC

glaak wrote: post #18

esrauch wrote: post #7

Unfortunately I think the dismissive attitude of your friend is a direct product of very real reverse discrimination. Anecdotally it really does exist; a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university. My ex girlfriend had her hand held for literally years by Microsoft recruiters on the stated…

Anecdotally it may exist; statistically, however, it does not. Let's think about your "female friend" who has lousy technical chops and a 2.5 gpa at a mediocre state university. Is every woman with a 2.5 GPA at a lousy state university getting an interview at all three companies? No? Hmm. I suspect there's something much more to her resume than what you're telling her. These companies are not all simultaneously sayin…

Regarding the overall statistics; I agree, hence what I wrote about there being real discrimination against them. What I intended to claim (but perhaps could have been more clear about) is that women have these out-in-the-open advantages and even more hidden-behind-closed-doors disadvantages.

You seem to be attaching an argument to my statement that I did not intend to convey; I don't think that reverse discrimination is an issue. I think it is extremely visible, and gives you really lousy visible situations like the ones I mentioned that are obvious errors, that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea.