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If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#421

Post by trebuhd »

samstave wrote: post #275
viewtransform wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a recruiter contacted me for a position at Google in 2012, I happened to be also taking Daphne Koller's Coursera class on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM). I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a dec…

Its like a real-life implementation of that life-score episode of Black Mirror (and what the chinese government is looking to do to their entire population. When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews. Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day. I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given. Then they a…

I had a similar experience interviewing at Wikia.

I was straight out of uni and the interview was a three-part, month-long process.

At the end, HR called me and gave me an offer, "welcome to the team" included and so on.

I was just told to wait a week for the CEO's formal approval, which was to be "standard procedure" for every new hire.

A week became two weeks, then another two weeks, then another. During that I was still assured the job was coming.

In the meantime, I found another job, a pretty good one.

A month later, I got a call from HR at Wikia saying that maybe I should start looking for a different job.

At the time it was a real disappointment for me, but it taught me to be never be sure until I'm holding the signed contract in my hand.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#422

Post by taneq »

cynicalkane wrote: post #170
eropple wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: rec…

Google's interviewing process is incongruously uneven compared to the rest of the company, which is top-notch. I recommend giving it another thought. (Disclaimer: ex-Googler.)

I'm curious how you reconcile these two facts, given that the rest of the company presumably joined via the interviewing process. Does this uneven process produce consistent results or do you simply weed out the less-than-top-notch hires quickly after hiring them?

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#423

Post by arkh »

fareesh wrote: post #203

As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and/or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious…

And what most call diversity is only about skin color and gender. The exact definition of racism and sexism.

You have more diversity of thought and behavior across social classes or countries: a person coming from Chile to work in the USA will add more perspective than most kind of American born person. A person raised in a rural area will add more to a company comprised of city dwellers than most other city person.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#424

Post by gadders »

trebuhd wrote: post #421
samstave wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its like a real-life implementation of that life-score episode of Black Mirror (and what the chinese government is looking to do to their entire population. When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews. Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day. I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given. Then they a…

I had a similar experience interviewing at Wikia. I was straight out of uni and the interview was a three-part, month-long process. At the end, HR called me and gave me an offer, "welcome to the team" included and so on. I was just told to wait a week for the CEO's formal approval, which was to be "standard procedure" for every new hire. A week became two weeks, then another two weeks, then another. During that I was…

>>At the time it was a real disappointment for me, but it taught me to be never be sure until I'm holding the signed contract in my hand.

Always this. And don't stop interviewing and applying until it happens.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#425

Post by peoplewindow »

mcguire wrote: post #350
CWuestefeld wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true). One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT. There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those eli…

Most of the best professors I have had were researchers teaching they favorite subject. Most of the worst were "CS education" types who should have been good teachers.

How are you judging "best professor"?

I had professors at my school that taught their pet research topics. They all sucked at teaching, partly because their research areas were utterly irrelevant for undergrads who were still struggling to learn programming. RDF, anyone?

The best profs were the ones who had been working developers in industry. They found ways to make the classes engaging and fun, vs just lifelessly reading their notes out loud (often in impenetrable accents).

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#426

Post by peoplewindow »

hueving wrote: post #345
rodgerd wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials. That is literally the diversity angle.

No, the 'diversity' angle is frequently tied to things like skin color, sex, ethnicity, heritage, etc. You can have two people that match in all of those categories but one chose to go to a state school because of a family issue and then they will be ignored by Google. This is not something any diversity program I know of in the big companies is trying to address.

In the UK this would be called classism. It's the same thing but in the US setting.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#427

Post by peoplewindow »

wpietri wrote: post #235
jldugger wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there? On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selec…

> Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there? Yes, I can. The whole point of education is to rise above your biases and intuitions.

That's a very noble view. I'd say the point of education is primarily money: for the teachers/profs who teach and the students who study. Academics in the humanities in particular like to claim that listening to them lecture for a few years will grant someone a better soul and make them intellectually superior for life, but there's no evidence of that and indeed, I sometimes suspect it's the opposite.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#428

Post by peoplewindow »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #258
Consultant32452 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased" because bias goes both directions. In fact almost all universities go out of their way to get women into their tech programs. I think what you're talking about is trying to find a candidate pool that is more biased towards minorities than average, which is fine, but let's use the correct language. Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a…

> We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased Fine--we want more women. Research, and personal experience, shows gender-mixed teams outperform [1][2][3][4]. This is a business, not HR, decision. We also want more cultural diversity. I don't like pitching in Latin America or the Middle East with zero cultural context on the home team. If you're a B2C company, you probably want socioeconomic diversity on…

It's not a business or HR decision, it's a political decision. Of course business and politics are intertwined.

Re: your papers. I've looked at such research before. I've yet to see such a study that's as conclusive as it's made to sound. Last time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15490501

Randomly picking the last paper you cite for example, we learn that Spanish companies with more women on the board have better financial performance. Seems like an open and shut case! But then buried deep in the paper, we also learn that the Spanish government has passed lots of sexually discriminatory laws that financially advantage companies that achieve arbitrary gender quotas, most notably, only companies with a certain level of female presence on boards can bid for public contracts.

The Spanish economy isn't the best. Big chunks of the Spanish economy is propped up by government spending originating in ECB quantitative easing and it's been that way for a while. If companies with male-only boards are being discriminated against in public procurement contracts, that by itself is sufficient to explain part of the difference.

That's a common problem with papers that argue more women on boards = more financial performance. Invariably they are studying countries that artificially tip the playing field towards such companies already, making it difficult to disentangle the different factors.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#429

Post by peoplewindow »

wpietri wrote: post #247
fareesh wrote: post #203

As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and/or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious…

I think perhaps you aren't looking at this through a long enough lens. You can tell America's history in terms of decreasing inequality of opportunity. We started with only well-off white men having the vote; black people were chattel and women were pretty close. We have sporadically worked ever since to repair that. One civil war, assorted constitutional amendments, and 8 civil rights acts so far. We try something,…

That's itself a very biased telling of how things are.

The USA along with many other western nations now discriminates against men in favour of women, in many concrete and very specific ways:

- Family courts

- Rape shield laws

- In the private sector, tech sector programmes handing out money but only to women

- Laws that mandate gender ratios in certain situations, like bidding on government contracts

Society has bent over backwards to try and create equality of outcome for women, thereby simultaneously eliminating equality of opportunity for men. This is not actually progress. Progress would be equal opportunity for all.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#430

Post by QAkICoU7IDNkpFu »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #226
s73ver_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for one, 3 schools do not the market make. For two, it means they're not making any effort to reach out to those in disadvantaged populations. It's a large problem that a lot of companies have.

The thing I'm questioning is how you could describe being proportionate to the candidate pool as "a large problem." Lack of diversity in STEM is a large problem, but your payroll matching the market doesn't seem like a large problem.

>Lack of diversity in STEM is a large problem

Diversity of what? And why is it a problem?

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