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'm asking to better understand - can you think of ways to make an interview process more comfortable? What about 'blind' remote interviews (ie, no video, but audio)?
Voice interviews are biased against non-native speakers of the company's language.
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…
>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…
What is the "Zuck" personality type? Zuck is famous for being a supposed Aspie robot in front of Congress, quite an "anxious, pale-skinned, Jewish guy" as you write
Or are we talking about the personality type of a movie character pretending to be Zuck?
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…
Yea, I’m white and I feel I have less in common with the Ivy League Zuckerbro personality than I have with poor and working class folks like who I grew up with. When I see my interviewer has two popped collars under his Stanford sweater I can instantly feel the anxiety growing. I think to myself “the minute I open my mouth he’s going to hear the mining town and farm work coming out.” It’s more about cultural backgrou…
Salt of the Earth, if you ask me. BTW, outside of undergrad legacy and big name donor admits, there's a lot of "normal" people who work and study at Stanford. (I worked there for 5 years in a 3% acceptance program with CS/MD IITians and other lesser Ivy Leagues like Haáàrvard ;).) 98% are normal, only 1 in many is a talent jerk because it's very socially selective rather than talent only. To be honest, it's the popped collar folks who need to prove that they didn't land their job from their pedigree alone and didn't skate through life on other people doing their homework and their parents teaching them laws/rules don't apply to them because they're an aristocrat because M O N E Y.
The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won't lose female talent you find later when they refuse to join a…
Given the complexity of the feelings a lot of people have and are developing over time, I think it's worth emphasizing how the push for gender balance can backfire. The linked writeup mentions "diversity fatigue", and it can turn people who would otherwise support fixing the pipeline into cynics. We have a woman who was hired on my team at work. As soon as management saw an actual woman had applied, the interview pro…
That situation sucks, but it’s possible do anything the wrong way, including diversity.
With such politically charged issues, it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible. If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representa…
If you've not seen it, Thomas Sowell incisively comments on the wish for the impossible in The Quest for Cosmic Justice. There's a full book, but the original speech gives the main point: https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html Definitely worth a look, even if you don't think it applies here.
Oh it absolutely applies - excellent reminder and post!
Have you tried therapy? The fact you are not able to concentrate and perform when "'Zuck' white guy personality type" (whatever "Zuck" type means) is present, suggests a deeper personal issues and biases that you need to work on and resolve. If there are no personal issues then your comment, honestly, comes across as a bit racist.
I agree with the sentiment that maybe therapy would be helpful for the OC, but speaking as a woman, I have a similar problem. Growing up my dad used my thoughts and emotions as weapons against me so "showing my thought process" to strangers that are men in a high stakes environment like an interview is incredibly crippling. I tend to disassociate once I'm uncomfortable and I'm not able to recover in the span of an in…
You deserve better and I wish you as speedy a recovery as possible. It's going to be quite difficult for interviewers and coworkers to work around an injury that you and the professionals you work with have been yet unable to heal.
Sure, but the scope of what most companies are concerned with is their hiring goals for the next 1-2 years (let's be generous and say 5 years). What you're talking about clearly falls into the pipeline problem and just further supports the premise -- something like a 20 year timescale issue. Which goes to the truth of this article -- this problem is far beyond the power (or responsibility) of any company. I'm not say…
I believe hnick is not talking about twenty years, but taking a good employee, enrolling them in bootcamp, then training them for a number of months.
Yes that's one way. Many roles in some companies are relatively light on tech and rely a lot more on domain specific knowledge, so those are ideal stepping stones too.
Have you tried therapy? The fact you are not able to concentrate and perform when "'Zuck' white guy personality type" (whatever "Zuck" type means) is present, suggests a deeper personal issues and biases that you need to work on and resolve. If there are no personal issues then your comment, honestly, comes across as a bit racist.
Your cultural beliefs and intuitions ARE personal issues and biases. They are challenging to overcome. Racist people don't get to being racist by reading a blog post or two; they develop and internalize it over time like any cultural trait. Same goes for these anxieties people of color feel. It's ignorant to not realize that all of these things are mental. Duh, therapy helps. Trust me, every single person of color wh…
Also, people of color are often racist, and white people often have anxieties.
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.
How many engineers at these companies? The only place I had to extend my range a bit to find women engineers in my part of the organization was at Amazon.
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…
>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. Many women get nudged/pushed into middle management instead of promoted to technical leads or directorships. It's often a way for companies to claim they "promote" women, while forcing them into roles that are vulnerable t…
That's rather tin-foil-hatty. Directors and above are a rounding error in employment. The conventional wisdom is that the good jobs are management, the only way to get pay rises and survive ageism-based layoff. This is the first I've heard someone claim that getting promoted to management is an attack.