How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#61

Post by furiouslysleepy » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 4:01 AM UTC

krichman wrote: post #52

jackpirate wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... But that's still not really fair ... "Fairness" as you use it should have no part in a business decision. The Microsoft HR team identified that for them to maximize their competitiveness (i.e. profit), they need more female staff members. That means that an "underqualified" woman suddenly becomes more qualified because she brings a business advantage to the table that a man does not. I have no problem with this.

So it's also fine if they determined that having half as many women would increase their competitiveness?

There are two things here:

1. Microsoft does not make decisions (mostly) based on fairness to prospective employees. It DOES make decisions based on having a good public image, part of which is being seen as diverse and inclusive.

2. The reason being diverse and inclusive is seen as good is because of a ton of research showing that being diverse is good for companies, good for employees, and good for entire underrepresented communities.

So it's not fine, but the fineness or not does not exist in a vacuum. The two situations are not arbitrary, and therefore, not analogous.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#62

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 4:01 AM UTC

azakai wrote: post #57

nostrademons wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really - there's a really simple solution for hiring more women without dropping the bar for them. Make your company the most desirable place for anyone to work, so that you have vastly more applicants than positions, and then you can pick whoever you want as the incoming cohort. Math: Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 mill…

> Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. That's not how the world is.

It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other.

It's not necessarily true when you compare between organizations, where different groups may make subtly different decisions with wildly different outcomes (although even then, a lot of the difference comes from different circumstances and not innate talent of the people involved). But in an organization, the need for teamwork and to "row in a common direction" tends to flatten out individual differences, and there're generally two possible classes: "valued contributor" and "holding back the group".

(This is also why large organizations like Google tweak their hiring processes to avoid false positives more than false negatives. One bad hire forces the team down to his level, as they always have to stop and explain things to him, or he'll block them from implementing a cleverer solution that he wouldn't understand. One good hire, however, very rarely raises the level of the team - he needs a lot of patience and very good empathetic & people skills to do so.)

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#63

Post by esrauch » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 4:15 AM UTC

Smudge wrote: post #23

esrauch wrote: post #7

Unfortunately I think the dismissive attitude of your friend is a direct product of very real reverse discrimination. Anecdotally it really does exist; a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university. My ex girlfriend had her hand held for literally years by Microsoft recruiters on the stated…

> Anecdotally it really does exist You can take just about any conceivable trend and anecdotally "confirm" its existence based on a small enough sample size or the right anecdote. That doesn't mean it is statistically relevant.

Can you clarify this, are you claiming that reverse discrimination for women in CS doesn't exist? I wasn't aware that there was any question about that; I understand it to be publicly stated policy at all big tech companies. Note that I'm not making a claim that women are more likely to be hired or promoted; as I said there is a lot of discrimination against women that is less visible which is exactly what reverse discrimination is trying to, well, reverse.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#64

Post by azakai » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 4:26 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #62

azakai wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. That's not how the world is.

It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other. It's not necessarily true when you compare between organizations, where different groups may make subtly different decisions with wildly different outcomes (although even then, a lot of the difference comes from different circumstances and not innate talen…

> It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other.

No, that is simply not true. There might be a cutoff over which everyone is "reasonably competent", and perform "acceptably", but there are still huge differences between people.

You immediately say "no" to people that don't reach the "acceptable" bar. But above that, you have hiring quotas, and you try to maximize the value of the people you hire. Hiring someone just above the bar now means you get one less hire later. Someone much better might show up, and often does. And on the other hand if the current candidate is much, much above the bar - you fight to get that person hired, you work on convincing your peers in the hiring process. Because they are worth it. Such people have a much higher chance to be hired.

I've been on both sides of the hiring process many times and worked for many years in tech. To say that above some skill level everyone is the same, "can do it as well as any other" - not in all of my experience.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#65

Post by esrauch » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 4:29 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #13

esrauch wrote: post #7

Unfortunately I think the dismissive attitude of your friend is a direct product of very real reverse discrimination. Anecdotally it really does exist; a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university. My ex girlfriend had her hand held for literally years by Microsoft recruiters on the stated…

a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university There's more to aptitude than GPA and "technical chops". A student who started from zero (as is common for girls in CS) and had a 2.5 GPA after four years would look much more appealing to me than a student who had been programming since they we…

The trajectory theory is interesting, if two applicants were otherwise similar you would count it against someone for having experience before college? In this case, she was actually someone who took 2 years of computer science in highschool, though her resume didn't say that so so I'm not sure how someone could assess her trajectory that way.

Honestly all of that is irrelevant. What I was actually trying to get at was at the time I was minorly irked (probably just like the guy in this story) due to a perceived unfairness against me due to gender. I've since come to the conclusion that reverse discrimination really is as huge as it seemed then, but that companies are making such big efforts because there is an even larger but less visible bias against women that simply isn't obvious to college kids or even most industry professionals.

The friend's position is totally understandable given the totally different levels of visibility of the two directions of discrimination; that doesn't make him correct.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#66

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 4:47 AM UTC

azakai wrote: post #64

nostrademons wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other. It's not necessarily true when you compare between organizations, where different groups may make subtly different decisions with wildly different outcomes (although even then, a lot of the difference comes from different circumstances and not innate talen…

> It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other. No, that is simply not true. There might be a cutoff over which everyone is "reasonably competent", and perform "acceptably", but there are still huge differences between people. You immediately say "no" to people that don't reach the "acceptable" bar. B…

How large an organization? There are big differences between what a 10-person startup needs and what a 20,000 person mega-corp needs.

(FWIW, I would pay much more attention to individual performance differences if I were hiring for my own startup than I would when interviewing for Google. But I thought the context of this discussion was organizations large enough for gender quotas to matter, i.e. the Microsofts and Googles of this world. If it were my own startup, I'd try to hire from the population I've personally worked with, avoiding this whole discussion anyway. And I have never worked in an organization with a hiring quota - the companies I've worked for will all take you if you meet the hiring bar, and hold cash in reserve so they can scoop up a suitably-qualified employee if one presents herself. For that matter, I've been given offers at several places that were "not hiring", so I'm guessing quotas are just guidelines in many other places as well.)

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#67

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 5:05 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#68

Post by jes5199 » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 5:34 AM UTC

azakai wrote: post #64

nostrademons wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other. It's not necessarily true when you compare between organizations, where different groups may make subtly different decisions with wildly different outcomes (although even then, a lot of the difference comes from different circumstances and not innate talen…

> It largely is in an employment situation. There are a number of people that are all well-qualified for the job, and any one of them can do it as well as any other. No, that is simply not true. There might be a cutoff over which everyone is "reasonably competent", and perform "acceptably", but there are still huge differences between people. You immediately say "no" to people that don't reach the "acceptable" bar. B…

The startups I've worked at hire everyone who's good. Quotas and headcounts exist at companies like Intel, but VC funded startups can't possibly hire quickly enough to spend all their investment.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#69

Post by natrius » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 7:27 AM UTC

masterzora wrote: post #44

jules wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to right handed people. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% right handed, then that is money largely spent on recruiting right handed people. Spending money specifically on recruiting left handed people brings the budget to parity. Dividing up the population into two groups using your…

What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance. Why? Just on topic that leaves out two very, very important things: 1. The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men and it will take a nontrivial investment of resources to c…

"The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men"

This is untrue. There are probably all sorts of societal issues that affect whether one enters the tech industry based on gender, but those aren't inherent to the process. It's also not clear that hiring practices will help the problem. A desirable company can improve its gender ratio, but only by hurting the ratio at other companies. (I don't think this is a bad thing.) Something has to cause more women to become programmers, and I doubt hiring practices are the solution.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#70

Post by natrius » Fri, Sep 28, 2012, 7:31 AM UTC

masterzora wrote: post #51

codex wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of the students are CS majors. They presumably will both eventually work for similar companies. Why would the woman who is equally interested in computer science pass over the job posting, requiring an actual recruiter to be present, when the man does not? Do women get CS degrees and then leave to work in some other field post-graduation, not writing code? If so, that is a huge problem. Do they lose interest in…

I hope you don't mind if I'm not interested in spending a few hours tracking down all the sources I've referenced before but to give you a short answer to your first paragraph: for the past decade or so women have held 20-30% of the CS degrees with recent times being somewhat higher. Women also hold less than 20% of the software positions ( http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/04/science-engineer... ctrl-F for "1…

The current scheme of things strongly signals to women (pretty accurately) "your odds of getting hired are lesser than your equally talented male friend."

Do you have some sort of evidence for this? Anecdotally, talented female programmers stay on the market far shorter than males do. Most companies desire a gender balance, which makes the limited stock of female programmers more vlauable.