51–60 of 102 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are millions of 'Tall White Guys' in prison, earning minimum wage, living on the streets. It's really not that much of a privilege.
I was literally homeless and earning minimum wage at one point so this is something I'm familiar with.
The advice about interviewing being exhausting is spot-on. Recruiting, interviewing, and hiring candidates is a very different type of work than most of us engineering types enjoy. Until you’ve developed a thick skin, it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate. The best compromise I’ve found is to have a dedicated person or team perform high-quality first pass filtering of candidates so t…
> it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate. How so? I mean I can certainly see why interviewing is not for everyone, but this really never crossed my mind. It's not like you know the candidate. Also you want to keep a good standard in your company, don't you? So why would this ever matter to you.
You don't have to know someone to have empathy for them.
Rejection can be tough for people. Especially those who get excited about the job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you compete with them on any other talented employee who they pay top dollar for and are willing to train via internships? You provide them with things they cannot get at those companies. In my experience it's not difficult to find great minority engineers if you build a culture that is actually inclusive. Few companies really do that, large or small, and retention of minority engineers is abysmal at large com…
That's a fair point and I agree with you, but there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem to create that inclusive environment. What other things would attract talent over Fortune 500 companies? I ask because it's really tough for SMBs to develop hiring programs without the margins the big companies have.
There's also how you do the interview process. A smaller company should be able to do a more personal interview process and lean less towards metrics that can be scaled to millions of interviews. Top university is a viable metric but can you cast your net more broadly? Internships are good guides but can you do a code test or contract-to-hire instead if the candidate was too busy working manual labor during the summer? Can you partner with a boot camp to get access to their best graduates?
edit: Also, you want to ensure that your interviewers don't confuse blind confidence with skill. Imposter syndrome in particular seems to affect minority and female engineers which can be interpreted as a lack of skill even if they give the correct answers.
I don't know, anecdotally, relationships broke down with me and other stakeholders, and I ended up leaving the company, after I pushed hard for an amazing candidate, the first to ever ace my interviews, whereas said other stakeholders wanted a certain diversity candidate, who while I enjoyed meeting didn't do that well. The funny thing is in SF it's the bro-y white guy CEOs who push the wokeness the hardest. Almost f…
Well I can share my individual perspective as a tall white guy. Sure, I've been through extraordinary struggles and life difficulties in my early adulthood, yet life is still pretty much easy mode just from the privilege. If you've ever read The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, the best way I can describe it is it almost feels like being ta'veren. Even if I'm having an off-day, not performing well, doing the wrong thi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I can share my individual perspective as a tall white guy. Sure, I've been through extraordinary struggles and life difficulties in my early adulthood, yet life is still pretty much easy mode just from the privilege. If you've ever read The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, the best way I can describe it is it almost feels like being ta'veren. Even if I'm having an off-day, not performing well, doing the wrong thi…
Are you also college educated? Under 30, middle-aged or old? Why treat "White Guys" as a monolith?
Certain demographics are less inclined towards certain jobs. Does anyone seriously think it's a problem that non-white females are represented at less than 0.1% of deep sea welders? Humans are not all equal in proclivities or even innate abilities. The proposed solution by diversity campaigners is usually some form of discrimination, usually against white and Asian people. An Asian male has a much, much higher bar to…
> Certain demographics are less inclined towards certain jobs. This is true, but it isn't inherent to those demographics. I, as a male, was not inclined to ballet dancer as a child. That's not because men aren't good at it, it's because in my culture, male ballet dancers were gay, and in my culture gay was one of the worst things a man could be. So if women are less inclined towards software jobs, is it because all,…
Medical school admissions are the strongest example of this trend. Given the same MCAT score and GPA, Asian people are accepted at a rate significantly lower than average and something like half as often as the most favored groups. (https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...)
2015: White men [Jewish Americans, CIS immigrants, EU immigrants] are not diverse 2020: Asian men [Chinese-Americans, Korean-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and immigrants from all respective countries] are not diverse 2025: White and Asian women are not diverse 2030: ???
The advice about interviewing being exhausting is spot-on. Recruiting, interviewing, and hiring candidates is a very different type of work than most of us engineering types enjoy. Until you’ve developed a thick skin, it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate. The best compromise I’ve found is to have a dedicated person or team perform high-quality first pass filtering of candidates so t…
> it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate. How so? I mean I can certainly see why interviewing is not for everyone, but this really never crossed my mind. It's not like you know the candidate. Also you want to keep a good standard in your company, don't you? So why would this ever matter to you.
You're trying to hire because you want to find someone to help you and you're hoping this next person will be the one to be that help. The person looking for a job obviously wants to find a job that will work well for them, and especially during this pandemic it's entirely possible that the stakes are higher for them than normal (do they currently have a job? Are they moving out of fear of their job going away? etc).
I think that it's entirely possible that someone would find it stressful to reject a stream of applicants - repeatedly telling a series of people, to their faces, knowing that they're people and not just faceless applicants, that it's not going to work out might very well be stressful to some people.
I don't know, anecdotally, relationships broke down with me and other stakeholders, and I ended up leaving the company, after I pushed hard for an amazing candidate, the first to ever ace my interviews, whereas said other stakeholders wanted a certain diversity candidate, who while I enjoyed meeting didn't do that well. The funny thing is in SF it's the bro-y white guy CEOs who push the wokeness the hardest. Almost f…
How is rejecting a candidate soley based on race not racial discrimination? This is illegal where I live; it is probably why companies never give interview feedback to the interviewees because they make these illegal hiring decisions behind the scenes but then say “it wasn’t a good fit”.