Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#71

Post by _pergosausage » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #45

leshow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring? To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.

I suppose that if a company is going to try to artificially hire a greater number of a single group then naturally the bar must be lowered.

Take this hypotherital:

Bob's factory employs machinists to make parts. Of all machinists, 20% belong to group A and 80% belong to group B. When hiring, Bob's factory selects a number of applicants who pass the test. If we assume that group A and group B have the same average skill level then naturally the employees in the factory will be 20% group A and 80% group B.

If Bob wanted to hire eaqual amounts of Group A and Group B, then he would need to hire as much of group a as possible and as little of group b as possible. If bob could only hire a certain number of group b, then he would naturally only pick the best few.

Thus, artificially eaquallizing the work force in bobs factory must neccecarily lead to a skill gap.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#72

Post by shados » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:45 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #45

leshow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring? To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.

You can still lower the bar below "hiring straight out of college in droves".

Hiring more self taught and bootcamp people is often advocated as a way to increase diversity, and a lot of roles don't require a college degree (plus a lot of self taught and bootcamp folks are very good). However, on a large enough dataset, they will be weaker candidates. So if you use those sources to improve diversity, you'll end up with a correlation between diverse hires and more junior devs. Which screws up with every other metrics you'll look at.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#73

Post by autokad » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

leshow wrote: post #15

ch4s3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

its even more troubling then that. When faced with stiffer ability to get interviews (let alone offers), we practice a ton more to increase our hard skills. more practice does tend to lead to being more proficient at something. my female friends generally got 5-10 interviews a week. me, not so much

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#74

Post by jlebrech » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:47 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #4

jlebrech wrote: post #3

I think the industry is suffering from the cobra effect right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Can you elaborate?

as leshow deleted their comment (edit: I can see it again) i'll explain:

* facebook got criticism for not hiring enough women as coders.

* facebook hired more women (probably lots of junior coders)

* they do what junior coders do

* someone turned the code review rejections into a spreadsheet and disregarded seniority (experience mainly), and made the issue about gender.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#75

Post by hamandcheese » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:47 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #45

leshow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring? To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.

If the bar is the same, but there are fewer female applicants than male applicants, then there will necessarily be fewer females accepted (assuming standards are applied equally).

Until the number of women in our field are on par with men, efforts to create an artificial balance will mean lowering the bar.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#76

Post by NaliSauce » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:47 PM UTC

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #12

tldr This article is terrible. Maybe this is a "Facebook rejects..." story. Maybe it's a story about how bad Facebook is. But if you keep reading past the introduction it sure sounds a lot more like a "male engineers reject..." story. And then if you keep reading some more it sure sounds like a "code is rejected proportionally to engineer seniority..." story, which is not a story. And then at the very very end, you f…

>the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be.

Where does it need to be and why?

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#77

Post by cbtacy » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #66

randomact2452 wrote: post #19

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.

Does this mean Fb hired more junior women ? it would be ironic if trying to get more girls into a company would backfire in the medias now..

"Girls"? Jeez... I wonder where the problem lies...

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#78

Post by douche » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:51 PM UTC

shados wrote: post #72

ch4s3 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring? To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.

You can still lower the bar below "hiring straight out of college in droves". Hiring more self taught and bootcamp people is often advocated as a way to increase diversity, and a lot of roles don't require a college degree (plus a lot of self taught and bootcamp folks are very good). However, on a large enough dataset, they will be weaker candidates. So if you use those sources to improve diversity, you'll end up wit…

I'm not sure you're going to correct the perceived gender/racial/whatever imbalances if you start hiring self-taught programmers and bootcamp grads in droves, just looking at the typical demographics of the people that self-select into those cohorts.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#79

Post by geofft » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:51 PM UTC

jcwayne wrote: post #68

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #12

tldr This article is terrible. Maybe this is a "Facebook rejects..." story. Maybe it's a story about how bad Facebook is. But if you keep reading past the introduction it sure sounds a lot more like a "male engineers reject..." story. And then if you keep reading some more it sure sounds like a "code is rejected proportionally to engineer seniority..." story, which is not a story. And then at the very very end, you f…

No good dead goes unpunished. As long as Facebook continues to increase the percentage of women it hires, it will have a disproportionately high number of junior female engineers. Intentionally failing to control for that fact is great if you want to profit from the problem of under-representation of women in engineering roles, not so much if you actually want to solve the problem.

> As long as Facebook continues to increase the percentage of women it hires, it will have a disproportionately high number of junior female engineers.

I don't understand why this follows. The standard argument I hear for why women are under-represented (relative to the null hypothesis) is the "pipeline," that at various stages in the process women drop out and it is hard to retain them. In particular, there's the argument that women put their career on hold for their family, which implies that there's a significant number of under-employed senior women.

I'd be very interested to see the number of years of experience vs. level assigned by Facebook, grouped by gender, which would answer whether Facebook's gender balance is really the result of a bunch of 0-years-experience hires. It seems very possible that causality here is the other way around: because women get their code rejected more often, therefore they do not get promoted as much.

Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

#80

Post by hyperdunc » Wed, May 03, 2017, 2:51 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #70

hyperdunc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part doesn't make much sense either because gender representation isn't a legitimate concept. Individuals have different strengths which may help them succeed if their pursuits use those strengths. This results in uneven gender distributions within industries and there's nothing wrong with that. Unless you think there is some sort of overt discrimination happening that's stopping females becoming senior engineer…

Can you provide evidence for the specific claim that women, in particular, are statistically-significantly less strong at the software engineering industry, in particular? (I buy the argument that there are statistically-significant differences in some strengths that apply in some industries, yes. I'm curious to see how this applies to software engineering in particular.)

I don't recall the exact source but I believe that overall, women score lower in tests for mathematical and logical aptitude, and higher in tests for verbal and social aptitude.

This correlates with the low numbers of women that choose to enter the industry, despite increasing incentives. It also correlates with female domination of fields such as nursing.