51–60 of 123 posts
I've heard that the opposite of this suggested bias ought to be consciously corrected. If the stereotype for a senior engineer is a balding white male with glasses, and you have two prospective engineers with otherwise identical resumes and work histories: one balding white male with glasses and even a pocket protector on his white shirt, and one black woman with a wild T-shirt, which would you hire? The answer I'd h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
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.
Why is your username green?
A couple of standout points from this article: * the data itself hasn't been released so no one outside of Facebook has in any way analyzed it, we're relying on their analysis and reportage of that analysis to be correct * the rejection rate is not just higher for female engineers, it's a lot higher: 35% * Facebook is confident that the effect is not due to gender bias (scrutinizing female workers' code more closely)…
It is hardly surprising or novel that junior/less experienced developers will write code that has more problems and thus gets rejected more often.
That Facebook hasn't achieved gender parity yet would suggest to me that the world hasn't yet caught up with supplying the demand for female employees at various levels of the corporate ladder without it impacting their business operations.
And then of course any disparities, properly normalized for alternative factors (or not), have to be corrected. Very messy science. It's also easy and politically expedient science - these days we're obsessed with inequality, and if you just comb around you're bound to find some statistically significant disparities and that gets everyone's attention. If researchers were trying to investigate population-level thoughtcrime, this is what it might look like.
You, on the other hand, represent yourself under the guise of anonymity, yet with purported knowledge of Facebook internal processes and discussions. The ramification is that, we as a group, must now take the irrationality of "your" identity and match it up with a rational "truth" presented which is "the level of rejection between genders is the same" (at Facebook).
The act of anonymity is likely rationalized as required to avoid judgement. Alternately, the act may be rationalized as an act by the company to avoid judgement, which means you aren't you, but someone posting on behalf of the company. Third, you may be an irrational actor who is posting this to troll us, which is to say an irrational desire to spread irrationality further into our group.
In all cases, this comment is highly irrational. If it's a troll, it's an objective of the troll to seek to spread further irrationality (additional unknown work). If it's a real human, who works at Facebook, posting this information is irrational because we have no way of knowing the context of the conversation, i.e. why did such a topic come up to begin with, who discussed it, who wrote the tests for it, and who conducted and analyzed the test results? Third and finally, if it is the company itself posting it, why is the company posting it? From an irrational standpoint, keeping this information "unofficial" makes it more likely to spread as a "truth" coming from the company, which means they are acting more like a troll with a purpose. (Which is not to say all trolls do not have purpose.)
If the company was ever to make this a public statement, I'm sure more work, or irrationality would come of it, given the questions I raise above about whether testing for this is done in a logical and fair manner.
Side note: I don't believe we should allow anonymous accounts to post because of the work required to untangle the logic. This is currently not possible to do with the HN software, so it's a moot point, and remains a source of dissonance for us.
Edit: Hello Facebook. Streisand effect, anyone? Getting about 1 negative downvote every 2 minutes. Fascinating.
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.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-female-engineers-clai...