81–90 of 123 posts
I think this could be improved by a system of code review anonymization that sends code reviews out - company wide - without identifying author info.
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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.)
> women, in particular, are statistically-significantly less strong at the software engineering industry
I think that what was they indicated was that because individual strengths may vary, because there likely isn't a strong balance of genders in the workplace. It would be obvious that due to different strengths of individuals that there would could be an apparent bias.
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?
I have not yet seen any concrete evidence to dispute the null hypothesis, that while gender is correlated with a great many things it is not correlated with the ability to be successful at Facebook. Therefore I accept the null hypothesis and think the right number is ~50%. I'm open to believing that the number should be different, possibly very different, given evidence.
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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 ski…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Of course this is just my belief, as a member of the industry, and not a scientifically-researched conclusion.
So, again, I'm curious to see evidence of why women's aptitude is poorly correlated with the specific industry of software engineering. (I would even buy, based on your argument, that women's aptitude is poorly correlated with academic computer science, but that's a very different field.)
Given that the engineer-lead study found this impact when controlling for seniority at FB while the suit-lead one didn't for rank, it certainly raises the question of why women have a lower rank for a given seniority. Charitably maybe men have more experience coming in, but if that was truly the case they could have used that as their input variable to avoid the obvious follow up concerns.
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This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.
Not necessarily. If the pool of talent is exactly the same(let's say 1000 women and 1000 men) and your interviewing process is perfect at determining engineer quality, but you are hiring 80 women and 20 men, then you'll hire the top 2% of men and the top 8% of women. Again, just assuming that the talent is exactly the same, the women you've hired will still be worse. In reality, the pool of female talent is very shal…
or maybe multinationals should be honest about hiring juniors, and think that would be good PR for them rather than just let people use their staff as a statistic.
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.
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 ski…
Bob's factory posts machinist ads on Craigslist. CL turns out to send Bob 90% males and 10% females. Bob decides to try to increase the number of females he hires, and advertises on a second site. Turns out this site is viewed by a higher percentage of females, and thus his number of female applicants increases, and the bar for hiring stays 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.
And can you share insights into what percentage of female engineers there see promotion (as compared to males), and if it's at the same velocity? Because, you know... spin.