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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

#41

Post by sitkack »

oneplusone wrote: post #8
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)?

> Facebook, alarmed by this data, commissioned a second study by Jay Parikh, its head of infrastructure, to investigate any potential issues. Parikh’s findings suggested that the code rejections were due to engineering rank, not gender. However, Facebook employees now speculate that Parikh’s findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast as male counterparts who joined the company at the same…

I'd love to see a distribution of level, age and years in industry, salary by age. If Fb has put more effort into hiring female engineers directly from college, then they will probably skew junior. The answer is probably not that simple and as you mentioned, all women are probably being challenged more than their male counterparts.

The general tone of this recent article on HN [1] I think was quite negative towards the OP, more so than the median. I have seen similar behavior in code and architecture reviews, interviews, etc for women at companies I have worked. Everything literally turns into a qual. Everything they do is judged to much higher standard. Or even non-sensical standard. It is still the case, that when I come across a woman in dev, she is most likely a freak'n bad ass and has a really thick skin. To me, this shows that we have not yet achieved equality, otherwise there would be more _average_ programmers who are women.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14227892

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

#42

Post by rndgermandude »

accountyaccount wrote: post #21
ybrah wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That wasn't said.

There are certainly good and bad developers no matter what gender.

If you have stricter hiring policies for men and e.g. only the top 10% of male candidates land a job while the less strict hiring procedures for females get the top 40% females a job, then you created an imbalance in skills between the genders in your company (and only there), and this is what might have happened here

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

#43

Post by panzer_wyrm »

jjawssd wrote: post #14
ch4s3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

"(...) However, Facebook employees now speculate that Parikh’s findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast as male counterparts who joined the company at the same time, or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted." > Code rejected due to rank > Women are of lower rank than men > We need to promote more women faster Facebook is about to get a ta…

We will have interesting case of positive feedback in that case.

If FB female code is of objectively lower quality promotions should make things worse. If it is not - it will be fixed.

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

#44

Post by Someone1234 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #30
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.

They aren't for an individual, they are for a data set.

Meaning that more senior people have a higher skill in the aggregate, and given the context they're talking about at least dozens of data points. One exception doesn't discount the trend.

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

#45

Post by ch4s3 »

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.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring?

To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.

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

#48

Post by zeveb »

accountyaccount wrote: post #21
ybrah wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, there's no biased assumption that women are worse developers, just one about relative numbers and relative skill distribution.

If the number of qualified female developers is less than the number of qualified male developers, then any company which manages to achieve hiring parity has either lowered the qualifications it demands from women developers, or increased the incentives it offers to them relative to other firms (enabling it to capture a higher share of high-skill female developers). Since the latter approach is obviously discriminatory and quite possibly illegal (not to mention a blatant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work), the former is more likely.

The result of the former is that the median female developer at that company will have lower skill than the median male developer at the same company, even if women in the population at large have the same or better development skill.

The incentive strategy could enable a firm to secure the best female talent, but besides the ethical and legal implications it would also make things much worse for all the other firms out there: the best female talent being off the market, those firms would be forced to either settle for lesser-skilled women or accept a disproportionate share of male developers, neither of which would be appealing.

Naturally, increasing the supply of women developers to match that of male developers (or reducing the supply of male developers …) would improve the situation, but that's a horse of a different colour.

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

#49

Post by jlebrech »

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.

it's sad that you have to create a throwaway to have a genuine opinion here.

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

#50

Post by Toenex »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #12

tldr This article is terrible. Maybe this is a "Facebook rejects..." story. Maybe it's a story about how bad Facebook is. But if you keep reading past the introduction it sure sounds a lot more like a "male engineers reject..." story. And then if you keep reading some more it sure sounds like a "code is rejected proportionally to engineer seniority..." story, which is not a story. And then at the very very end, you f…

> the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be.

So is the story really that the n is too small for this story?

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