You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview • Hacker News Board

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#381

Post by dozzie » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 10:57 AM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #118

pj_mukh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Indian (particularly) men consider engineering to be a safe choice (source: am Indian). Anecdotally, speaking to women (esp American), they find engineering to be categorically unsafe from a career progress perspective. You may not 'see' the bias, but they definitely feel it. The effect is measurable. I am no expert, maybe it has something to do with maternity leave regimes or the interviews (like OP m…

My wife worked as a programmer for a while. There were two aspects that drove her out. First was the cliquey nature of the guys she worked with, she just felt like she didn't fit in. Second was the rate of change, just as she felt like she mastered something the new flavor of the month would take hold and she had to start over.

A man would feel unfit in exactly the same way when put into an environment composed of mostly women (e.g. teacher in ground education). No surprise here.

Then, your wife must have worked with dynamic web pages (a.k.a. web applications), probably frontend, to have that tool churn. Other areas don't change that quickly and even then new tool allows to use most of the past experience.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#382

Post by minikites » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:00 AM UTC

T2_t2 wrote: post #137

balls187 wrote: post #36

Indians of Asian descent are a minority in the US, but well represented in Software Engineering. Further, there are plenty more Indian, Chinese, and Russian female engineers, than there are American (of european, aka White) female engineers. I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and g…

> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not. And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE. When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereot…

> they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions

Oh? Which ones are those? There used to be more women employed as computer programmers than men, for example. The shift happened because computer programming turned a corner and became prestigious, at which point it became "stereotypically male", and the pattern of "stereotypically male" = prestigious holds through a number of professions. Men are doctors while women are nurses. Men are professors while women are primary school teachers.

You can't just look at the present, you have to look at past shifts in employment demographics and "prestige" explains a lot more than "some genders just intrinsically desire certain kinds of work" (which, just to ensure my point is clear, is bullshit).

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#383

Post by jlebrech » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:08 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #5

The big result there is this: "Poor performances in technical interviewing happen to most people, even people who are generally very strong. However, when we looked at our data, we discovered that after a poor performance, women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men." On the hiring side, "For the specific case of an online job posting, on average, 1,000 individuals will see a job post, 200 will begin th…

teaching women to keep trying after failure should be done from an early age, i'm worried for women of the future that equality is causing men to learn the hard way along their whole career but for women they are going to be given easier routes to success but then fail in the real world because it's become hard all of a sudden.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#384

Post by dozzie » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:10 AM UTC

ubernostrum wrote: post #235

rjbwork wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I think the whiteboard thing is pretty lame, and would prefer to give and get coding tests on my own machine and environment. But yeah, I expect someone to be able to tell me what the complexity of various algorithms when shown them is and how to manipulate common data structures. At the very least one ought to be able to walk a tree don't you think? My front end engineer has to walk a tree of JSON on a proje…

And yet... this attitude is how we get stuff like the Homebrew guy tweeting that Google is happy to be internally dependent on his software while also saying he's not qualified to write software for Google, because their tech interview excludes him. (Google's interview process, in my experience, can be gamed heavily by just memorizing a dynamic-programming solution to the longest-common-subsequence problem; they love…

As far as I remember, the guy comes from the team that didn't understand what the heck are digital signatures for in package management. They refused to acknowledge the problem that they hosted everything through raw HTTP with no signatures whatsoever. This may be a hint that he indeed was not qualified.

Not to mention that people constantly complain about how Homebrew works with its dependency resolution, compared to how people rarely complain about Yum/DNF or APT.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#385

Post by wccrawford » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:25 AM UTC

wyclif wrote: post #356

mjevans wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe actual apprenticeships are the answer. 3-6 months to get someone trained up, and a lot of their pay would be in /training/ them (you'd still pay at least a living wage for the area, but you might upfront plan and disclose to relocate them if hired). The benefit would be both in seeing if they're a good fit, and also enriching that employee as an employee. Both sides would have a much better perspective of if it…

My experience, when I ask decision-makers about training, is that there's a lot of resistance to the idea because of fear of poaching.

There's fear of poaching because the tech industry is so incredibly bad at giving raises. People are forced to change jobs to get what they're worth after just a few years.

Some companies are smarter than this, but most are not, from what I've seen. So yeah, they're going to worry about poaching because they know they aren't doing what's really needed to keep people.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#386

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:27 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #5

The big result there is this: "Poor performances in technical interviewing happen to most people, even people who are generally very strong. However, when we looked at our data, we discovered that after a poor performance, women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men." On the hiring side, "For the specific case of an online job posting, on average, 1,000 individuals will see a job post, 200 will begin th…

[deleted]

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#387

Post by avasylev » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:31 AM UTC

inimino wrote: post #290

avasylev wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't make conclusion just from second argument alone. It's not hazing ritual because my first point. But I also think knowing them is useful, but I see a lot of people arguing it not needed at all. So what I tried to say in second, that regardless of what one thinks on usefulness of Algo knowledge,there's no excuse to ignore algorithm and expect to pass interviews.

If you think it's not necessary for the job but it's necessary for the interview, then at least we can agree the interview process isn't so great. Of course, knowing how to play the system is part of getting a job, but we can still point out that the system is broken. After all, these are systems we set up ourselves.

Agree process isn't great, if I knew better practical approach I'd use it instead.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#388

Post by kls » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:32 AM UTC

Klockan wrote: post #318

kls wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I postulate that false negatives are far more expensive, in a constricted talent pool. We keep seeing the adage that false positives are expensive but honestly if one cannot spot a false positive within 30 days of engagement with that person, then the hiring person should really contemplate their expertise in the field. I saw a really good write up (I think on here) where they basically did a initial "are you an idio…

Imagine that you passed your dream job interview, you pack you things and move to another state! 30 days into the new job you get the news, you are fired for being a low performer! You go online and post about your experiences, how horrible this company is for not looking out for their employees. You get a lot of responses saying that they have experiences the same, a large part of new hires are fired within the firs…

I did not go into deep detail about the article because I did not want to misquote it but my understanding was that they sent the prospects a VM with the entire dev environment running. Gave them a simple but real task that they needed accomplished and remote contracted them to complete that task (with compensation). They (the prospective developer) were given a full software spec, and access to the development team. They did track the time the team spent with the developer and did review the returned code. At worst it was a side gig with some income for the two week. IIRC 9K to each candidate whether completed or not. The way the process was structured was so that there was little risk to the applicant. The whole experiment was to expose their companies bias in the hiring process and the summation was they found it eye opening.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#389

Post by kls » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:37 AM UTC

clarry wrote: post #372

kls wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only failed one technical interview in my life, and to be honest I did not fail it, I took the confidence route which put off the 20 something lead I was interviewing with and mentioned that I was a keynotes speaker at IBM Impact on the coming transition to Javascript based applications. He took this as an affront and challenge (to be brighter than the IBM speaker guy to his team) and ensured that the intervie…

Stories like this make me feel very sorry for all the great people who just don't happen to have a network of great buddies like you.

My advise don't be sorry be proactive, if you meet one, be their friend, be their network, look out for them. That is how the world changes, one person at a time.

Re: You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

#390

Post by aries1980 » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 11:42 AM UTC

spacebat wrote: post #251

aries1980 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart. Why not?

A public company may not be able to, because the board may be sued for doing things that do not increase shareholder value in the short term?

The company's mission is to fulfil its purpose that may or may not related to immediate shareholder value. I recommend to read the Flow's author's other book called Good Business: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Business-Leadership-Making-Mea... . He describes quite well what bugged me with the concept of “a business entity is to maximise the profit”.