Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer • Hacker News Board

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#431

Post by f154hfds » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #423

conception wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite declarations that busing to desegregate schools failed in the 1970s and 1980s, that era actually saw significant improvement in educational equity. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, there was a 53-point gap in reading scores between black and white 17-year-olds. That chasm narrowed to 20 points by 1988. During that time, every region of the country except the North…

The case is interesting, through I would compare it to a similar but failed experiment in Sweden where students of got free points in their grade if they applied to a program where there would be a minority. Why did one have some success and the other had none? I would go back to the things I wrote above about what to do and what not to do. Providing free buses to people who live far away from desired schools do not…

For a majority individual to 'feel ok' with a minority jumping the line they must fundamentally believe their merits don't matter as much as the minority's group identity. Likewise, the minority must believe their merits don't matter either, only their group identity matters. Therein lies the problem, 'color blindness' and 'affirmative action' are diametrically opposed. The harder you push for the one is a push away from the other. Which is 'harder' for a society to learn - their merits don't matter or their group identity doesn't matter (in the context of say getting a job)?

It's such a shame, because we want as a society the hiring manager to go to the reservation job fair looking for applicants. But the manager knows that there are precious few 'qualified' applicants and we recognize they will tend to maximize the efficiency of their time.

Of course, it isn't an accident there are few qualified applicants in those places. Poverty has a holistic effect on a group. My hope is that groups can somehow separate financial poverty from poverty of ambition to try to break these cycles and make progress. Every 'group culture' has a unique ethos, many poor groups had rich ambition and rose out of their poverty over time. To me this is the only way I can see real progress being made without giving up on meritocracy (and by extension technological/scientific progression).

So the question becomes - what does it look like to cultivate group ambition?

1. Generational support: believe your situation is not guaranteed for your children. Fight for them. Sacrifice for them.

2. Education/medical: we pour resources into certain underprivileged places (not groups, physical locations). This isn't going against meritocracy, it's a long-term investment.

3. Recognize that human civilization is at its finest when people believe they can rise above their circumstances, despite all the external and internal factors pulling them down.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#432

Post by musingsole » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

lambda_obrien wrote: post #109

musingsole wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who you work with will usually be out of your control and respect their skills Unless you're in a small company with a substantial ownership stake, not only should you accept the reality of this but also accept that dealing with it is part of your job. Making the best of the team and resources available is part of the job description. If given the reins of the hiring process, a given developer could not do a better…

I guess not everyone agrees, since my comment was demolished.

Upvotes and downvotes are two sides to the same coin of passion! I'm used to my stricter "it's your job" comments getting downvotes. I always assume because they come off as hyper-conservative, bootstraps type language.

In this case, I think it's funny because the same mentality results in a more kumbaya attitude in the workplace (it's not my job to pick my coworkers. Whatever their faults, it is my job to succeed anyway). It's the type of thing I'd expect to be a bit of a upvote magnet...but I suppose hating on crappy coworkers trumps warmfuzzies in the HN crowd.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

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Post by curryst » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

CodeMage wrote: post #93

SavantIdiot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of a non-diverse company that doesn't understand diversity trying to implement some kind of diversity. I recall these kinds of ham-fisted attempts everywhere in the late 90's. Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity. I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity…

> When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572082239488...

I think part of that is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM/Cisco/etc". You're somewhat more insulated from accusations of cringe or racism because you can't accuse someone of those things for how they view their own culture. It's a touchy area, nobody wants to be in the news because their recruiting event turned racist. Reactions are harsh, I don't think "We did research and tried to put on a tastefully themed event, but failed to consider this particular viewpoint" is going to get you out of the news.

I also always took the "ambassador" to be an external facing thing. They speak for their culture at that company; the places I've seen it I was never given the impression that they were meant to be an ambassador for their entire culture. Maybe I was misreading it, though.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

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Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #335

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion. Which is why the entire concept of demographics-based "diversity" is such a shambles. The premise is supposed to be that if you get some women and minorities in there then you'll have a divers…

Exactly. Overly focusing on race is pretty one dimensional when it comes to diversity. The example I like is which would be more diverse in a silicon valley tech company - 1) an African American guy who grew up upper-middle class and went to an Ivy League school and always voted for "progressive" candidates or 2) a white guy who grew up poor in West Virginia, was the first to go to college and has an affinity for rig…

[deleted]

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#435

Post by bArray » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #196

bArray wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this before with hiring for women. Ending up as a 'diversity hire' can be absolutely awful, especially if you are really out of your depth. Even if you aren't a diversity hire, the fact that it happens a lot can sew that seed in your mind. I think you mostly have two scenarios: 1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it…

>An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. Employers never actually discriminate on anything anymore. Instead, they let the recruitment firms do all that unpleasantness for them.

I understand this is meant as a joke - but for sure it's a way of limiting your exposure on being accused of unfair hiring practices.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#436

Post by sokoloff » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

robin21 wrote: post #416

entee wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that as far as I know, all the founders of FAANG were white guys. As for why many Asian people work there, I think there is a strong bias toward engineering/medicine among many immigrant communities that came from a relatively educated background in their home countries (I count myself in that cohort, though I’m not Asian). Crucially though, once they got into the community they were more likely to blend into th…

https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/25badfc6b6d1b33f... See leadership. 30% Asian (6% us pop) 60% white (65% us pop) Asians widely over represented. Should we give less jobs to Asians and more to blacks and Hispanics? This kind of points to socioeconomic and educational opportunities in early life. Blacks come from poorer backgrounds etc. But why bring race into it? Why not lift up people from poorer backgrou…

That leaves the critical question: "lift up how and when?"

Lift up by better primary education? Lift up by more outreach to get more poorer people into computing as young adults? Or lift up by having hiring quotas for people whose family income was provably bottom quartile for at least 5 years in their childhood?

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#437

Post by bArray » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #228

bArray wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this before with hiring for women. Ending up as a 'diversity hire' can be absolutely awful, especially if you are really out of your depth. Even if you aren't a diversity hire, the fact that it happens a lot can sew that seed in your mind. I think you mostly have two scenarios: 1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it…

Thank you, I've been looking for a word to describe myself - turns out its "delusional". I thought we were using the comparison of societal demographics to company demographics to measure how true the "equal opportunity" statement was. You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. Having looked at those numbers and found them to show bias, I delusionally thought…

> You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias.

This is a false analogy, it robs people of their agency. Humans do not act with some uniform distribution. It could be cultural, social, environmental, class - any number of factors. People are different and these differences should be celebrated, not squashed and ironed out.

> people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves

> people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo

> complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally

Sure, but at what point have we biased the input enough? At what point do we except the result? Bare in mind for example, women were among the first programmers (computers). If we achieve equal numbers of men and women in programming roles, what makes you believe the situation won't once again become biased?

What concerns me is that equal outcome is a goal without any real measurement of success or plan to revert back to equal opportunity once the input has been 'corrected'.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#438

Post by jfengel » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #125

908B64B197 wrote: post #2

> I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical challenges. That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it. When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other one…

So why isn't some company or founder dipping into this underutilized labor pool and blowing everybody's doors off? That's a real question, and I don't have a good answer.

Because that underutilized labor pool is also pretty green. It's hard to build a product with smart, talented developers who haven't spent a bunch of years learning the ecosystem. There's really no good substitute for the apprenticeship young devs get by being exposed to best practices, senior developers who can cut through problems that they've seen before, configure work flows, etc.

That apprenticeship is expensive. It takes a lot of handholding. Not because they're not smart, but just because there's a vast amount of information that's hard to write down. It's a million little factoids, and they're easy to Google ... once you already know that they're there.

It's not impossible to build a company with one really good senior dev and a bunch of fresh-outs. But that's made one level more complicated when you've got a diversity of cultures in the room, and the hiring process ends up coming down to "Well, that guy just seemed like a better fit". So the excluded ones give up, and the process perpetuates.

I'm oversimplifying like crazy, and every real situation is different. But startups don't have the money or time to do better, and established companies just keep repeating their situations because that's what got them there.

Some day somebody may figure out how to change that... and they're almost certainly going to get run through the wringer on HN accusing them of being affirmative-action SJW wokeness virtue-signallers. Which just makes it one step harder, and when they fail (as most new things do) it will further cement for people that Those People just can't code.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#439

Post by munificent » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

twalla wrote: post #307

munificent wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this sounds horribly cringe-inducing and I don't fault you at all for walking away from IBM. At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkw…

> this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. I remember reading someone's opinion basically stating that things like that for underrepresented groups are unpaid emotional labor, which I kind of agree with - it's got to be a weird position to be in to be hired to write code and somehow end up as the defacto sounding board for questions regarding the…

> things like that for underrepresented groups are unpaid emotional labor

Presumably if the person in question is salaried and it's understood that they are spending work time on this, then it's not unpaid emotional labor. But, sure, it's work that requires leaning on emotional and social sensitivies one might otherwise not have to bring to bear in their tech job.

I don't think anyone should be obligated to do that kind of work because of their background. But my experience is that organizations and culture often progress only when some people do volunteer to do that work. And, fortunately, there are many people who choose to do that because the intangible rewards, for them, outweigh the costs.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

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Post by munificent » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

caffeine wrote: post #402

munificent wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this sounds horribly cringe-inducing and I don't fault you at all for walking away from IBM. At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkw…

Why would a Native American feel prospect feel more comfortable talking to a Native American employee? I think that's the cringey stuff parent comment is complaining about.

Greater number of shared experiences and common ground? Why do any pair of humans feel more comfortable talking to each other than some other pairs?