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We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

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Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#461

Post by friendlybus »

mjfisher wrote: post #88
sbilstein wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be reading into what I wrote a bit. This is just how I feel...not how I WANT to feel. Obviously, these are biases and anxieties that exist in my own mixed-race low-income immigrant brain that i wish weren't there. As another latino founder told me..."walk into a VC pitch meeting with the confidence of a tall white man." Like I don't hate caucasians but sometimes can't help but notice these differenc…

I don't know if this will be of any use to you. If you're pitching to VCs, you're already operating way above my level. I also don't know if it's different over here. I live and work in the UK and I'm white. I genuinely don't think I've worked with anyone in the tech industry who cares what race or background their co-workers have. There's definitely an underrepresentation problem (most grievously with female enginee…

Having lived and worked in the UK for five years, the class system overrides race. You would have to go far down the chain of accent, education, area you live in, people you hang out with and more before you hit race.

There are immigrants at the bottom that feel discriminated against because of race but they miss the basics of the culture and the ones that learn the system excel.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#462

Post by erklik »

int_19h wrote: post #394
ben_jones wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a drop out too and have made my way to manager where I find myself training juniors many of which also do not have degrees. Unfortunately it is night and day between the ones who do have degrees and those that don’t. At this point I am now strongly recommending cs degrees to anyone seeking a career in programming because the theories do come up in any serious work, particularly full stack engineers who must have…

In my experience as somebody without a degree and employed for >15 years now, you don't need a degree to get enough understanding of type theory and statistics, even for things at senior level. It will obviously depend on the specific project, but self-learning is very much a viable option in this industry. Conversely, I've seen many candidates with a CS degree who couldn't handle trivial coding challenges (and I mea…

You're absolutely right. A degree is not needed but a structured university program does seem to succeed in putting the majority of its students through that study, while those doing self-study are more likely to miss such concepts for other things considered more "practical"

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#463

Post by distantaidenn »

jonfw wrote: post #362
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions are being spent on housing in the bay area by these ultra rich companies even though it is arguably not at all their responsibility. Except it is, because of course it is. Who is responsible for fixing the gender imbalance in tech, if not the leaders in tech? (Of course the housing thing may just be a cynical calculation that it’s cheaper than the toxic public relations of doing nothing. But maybe that shoul…

> fixing the gender imbalance An imbalance doesn't inherently need to be fixed. If the imbalance is because women are simply less interested- an imbalance is desirable. Equality in opportunity will not neccessarily lead to equality in outcome. Any argument on this topic that is rooted in outcomes can be immediately dismissed. Attempt to measure the actual source of the problem- which is opportunity.

This is anecdotal, but I have noticed this pattern in several large (multinational) companies at which I have worked.

In a particular well-known American tech company with a large office in Tokyo, our recruiters were in part responsible for the pipeline of new recruits from abroad. I began to notice the recruiters feeding the pipeline with people that were essentially cookie-cutter templates of themselves.

I would say 90% of the interviewees had the same background: 30s-40s white male with a Japanese girlfriend/wife that wanted to move to Tokyo for family reasons. At one point, it just became a cliche.

I have no opinion on whether this was a good or bad thing, but it definitely overfitted for that particular persona and shifted the company's internal culture and diversity.

So while the source of the pipeline is definitely skewed, I would argue that whoever is doing the recruiting and subsequent hiring need also be evaluated regarding their criteria for employee selection.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#464

Post by aidenn0 »

vonmoltke wrote: post #409
aidenn0 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think in general people are bundling everything up as bias; many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias. A silly example: if your job description said "We only hire men" (and this weren't illegal), then even if your entire interview process were unbiased, you're probably going to end up with fewer men. There is an argument that individually and as a whole, the tech communi…

> many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias I consider sexism to be a subset of bias, so this is an interesting take. I do not think your example shows something as unbiased, because I consider the statement "We only hire men" to be biased.

Looking it up, there are many usages of the word bias that support your definition, so I'll concede that point.

However, I think GP was using the term bias in the way I tend to think of it which is measurement bias; that is evaluating male and female candidates differently from each other, so I was pointing out a way in which the candidates that show up to interview can be biased in a way which is definitely the fault of the company.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#465

Post by weberc2 »

hellisothers wrote: post #459
datashow wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is how you gonna find a different hiring pattern to force 50%? Internal training, ok, but are you going to only provide internal training to women? Is this even legal? Basecamp training, ok, but are you going to only provide basecamp training to women? Is this even legal? Special talents (dropouts etc.), ok, but are you going to only hire special talents who are women? Is this even legal? Non-traditional…

I agree, 50% is probably an unreasonable goal, I could maybe even see arguing that any percent based goal is a bad goal. The goal should be “enough so those who are feeling disenfranchised don’t anymore” but that might be too squishy :)

That’s a laudable goal, and to that end I imagine it would do a world of good to stop the constant exaggeration of how disenfranchised those groups are (NOTE that I’m not saying these groups are fully enfranchised, only that the disenfranchisement is exaggerated). At some point, advertising tech as a bunch of rapey, Nazi frat bros is probably more offputting than whatever discrimination actually exists. Let’s ditch the boogeyman and see what happens.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#466

Post by goosehonk »

ben_jones wrote: post #323
hellisothers wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the article is that restricting your hiring pool to only CS graduates is a bad pattern and you should consider other qualities instead so saying only 18% of CS graduates are female misses the point. Having no CS degree myself and excelling in a top 10 company I agree with this sentiment, especially seeing the epidemic of “over leveling” the small pool of CS graduates occurring. I’d rather work with…

I’m a drop out too and have made my way to manager where I find myself training juniors many of which also do not have degrees. Unfortunately it is night and day between the ones who do have degrees and those that don’t. At this point I am now strongly recommending cs degrees to anyone seeking a career in programming because the theories do come up in any serious work, particularly full stack engineers who must have…

As a person without a CS education but with 30 years of industry experience, including several of The Bigs, I urge young people to get an education in anything but CS. The number of CS degree holders, even the masters and doctors, who struggle with statistics, linear algebra, or even thermodynamics and basic accounting is pretty dispiriting. Get an education and learn to program computers. Two separate things in my humble opinion.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#467

Post by seangrogg »

romwell wrote: post #194
seangrogg wrote: post #20

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…

This is a strawman argument. The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things. It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that…

Accenture [1], BHP [2], Dell [3], and that's just a cursory glance at those that have made public commitments to 50% women "sharp" by a target year. My comment had nothing to do with software in particular (I explicitly call that out), just the utilization of the metrics themselves by any company.

I have nothing against companies taking a moment to reflect on how their hiring practices may be unintentionally (or worse, intentionally) stifling diversity. Rather, I'm invoking Goodhart's law here, in that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

[1] https://www.accenture.com/us-en/about/inclusion-diversity/ge...

[2] https://www.bhp.com/media-and-insights/prospects/2017/09/no-...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/dell-aims...

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#468

Post by anonytrary »

supernova87a wrote: post #187

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…

> A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them.

Not to mention, if the other companies also wish to hit their diversity goals, they will be forced to take on weaker hires, since the (already small) pool of adequate hires has been exhausted. In my opinion, diversity hiring is an anti-pattern. Hiring should instead ignore demographics information rather than use it to try and achieve some optimal representational balance. If demographics information are completely ignored in the hiring process (which is impossible if you do on-site hiring), then no one can accuse you of favoring a particular group of people.

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#469

Post by hackinthebochs »

danans wrote: post #449
hackinthebochs wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given that those are all concepts created by mathematics, which women have long excelled in - after all, women were the original "computers" before we had machines to automate calculations. Doing rote arithmetic is nothing like doing mathematics. Doing manual calculations is nothing like being a programmer. The activities have zero resemblance. Also, advanced mathematics degrees (i.e. Masters and above) have the sa…

> Doing rote arithmetic is nothing like doing mathematics. Doing manual calculations is nothing like being a programmer. The activities have zero resemblance. Understanding the function of pointers, classes, and most programming itself are also nothing like advanced mathematics. Even ML is largely stats and calculus in its technical aspects, not cutting edge math. There is zero at all evidence to suggest that women a…

>most programming itself are also nothing like advanced mathematics.

This is certainly true. But they do overlap in requiring a heavy amount of abstract reasoning. While "abstract reasoning" is a bit vague, one proxy for this is spatial reasoning which shows strong gender disparities and has implications for science and math ability.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-44385-0_...

Re: We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

#470

Post by dgzl »

supernova87a wrote: post #187

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…

We've abandoned the pursuit of equality for the pursuit of equity.
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