7 ms·

How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

67 points by rmartelli 10y ago

actionwords 10y ago
It sounds like you've had a bit too much to think. Calm down, take some Soma.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mseebach 10y ago
> My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education. This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity activist" might say something like that, but for a company of any sort of quality to just accept it and implement it, that's unrealistic. More realistically, what they may have implemented is something like accepting that people without CS degrees from top universities may still be perfectly capable software developers, which is true (being one, I'd like to think so, at least), but if that's the case, the article is grossly misrepresenting it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  By that logic shouldn't you not look at college degrees at all as more women hold degrees[0]? [0]http://time.com/4064665/women-college-degree/ http://time.com/4064665/women-college-degree/
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Since when did a college degree become a requirement for programming, or indicate a higher quality of programmer? I know CS graduates who have no ability to program. Half of these big companies have been started by dropouts, and the oldest ones were started when there was no such thing as a CS degree.
  - acctjustforyou 10y ago
    The fact that a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good programmer does not mean it is a worthless data point.
    - dclowd9901 10y ago
      I'd say overwhelming evidence points to the exact contrary.
      - acctjustforyou 10y ago
        Sounds like you've found a great indicator of skill then - "does not have a CS degree."
        dclowd9901 10y ago
        More like "possession of CS degree has no bearing whatsoever on skill, so ignore it."
- rmartelli 10y ago
  Sorry that it's hard to believe. My CEO was previously an activist so the people brought in to talk are definitely outside what you would expect in corporate America. Unfortunately it's hard to find sources for this except for internal videos. A quote from one of the trainers that gets at the same idea: "In sourcing diverse candidates, it is imperative to avoid criteria that are inherently biased, like using school selectivity and previous company as a proxy for performance or as a signal that someone is a strong candidate. Instead of focusing on previous companies or schools, which limits the talent pool, you should focus on relevant skills. For example, if Google is typically used as a signal that someone is a good candidate, push yourselves and your clients to articulate why that's the case. Is it the experience working at a large company that's useful?"
  - mseebach 10y ago
    There's nothing in that quote that goes anywhere near "assum[ing] that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education".
pessimizer 10y ago
Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar." [points 2,3,4,5,6,7,9] In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost. [points 1,8] edit: and about "open source" contributions; ethnic minorities and women are far more likely to have worked in large corporations rather than in open source or startups, because those companies are held to a higher standard in their behavior towards minorities than the kind of self-assembling social clubs that this article (and site) are focused on. edit 2: I know (very closely) a woman who has been in IT for 40 years. She was an English major, and has absolutely no involvement with open source. She doesn't know people in startups. Why would someone presume that she doesn't know the job?
- anothermoron 10y ago
  But they're specificially asking to discriminate against certain applicants in favor of other. "Hire people from certain place instead of other" "Favor people who never worked in company like google" "Hire people from "bad" college instead of top one"
- acctjustforyou 10y ago
  >Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar." So, suppose you had to fill an open position for a developer and you had two candidates: an MIT grad with years of experience at Apple and Google, and a homeless guy who never went to college and never worked in IT before. You're honestly going to try to tell us that you have no idea who might be the better candidate? And if hypothetically you could only interview one, you'd what? Be totally stymied? Flip a coin maybe? There's no possible way you can actually believe what you're saying. >In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost. [points 1,8] I don't recall him mentioning ruling people out before speaking to them, although once you get to a certain scale that has to happen at some point since if an individual manager gets 1,000 applicants for one position on his team he can't speak to them all. Or is math racist too? The scale requirement becomes much smaller when talking about reviewing someone's work, because that is much more involved than a resume scan or even most phone screens. Giving them a diversity grade boost is the definition of racism/sexism/*ism. Funny how youve managed to find yourself on the same side as someone who gives a buxom under qualified blonde a second interview because "we don't have any hot chicks in this office."
gtirloni 10y ago
Some companies will rate applicants in a series of categories. Education and experience are the usual. Lately, "fit" has become extremely important to HR departments. It usually means people with the same culture, race, age, music and sports tastes, etc. If your company thinks it has a diversity problem, it's probably related to "fit". My suggestion is to continue to filter people out based on education and experience equally and give a boost in the "fit" category to categories of people that are minorities in your company. I think that's perfectly fair to offset internal biases. EDIT: I get it some people are arguing that, by filtering on education/experience, there won't be any minorities left to be "boosted" in the "fit" category. If it is THAT bad, the company can try to expand who it's reaching out to but I understand that's a bigger problem (e.g. company in SV cannot afford relocation costs and thus has to look for local candidates only will not help with the diversity issue).
meira 10y ago
Just stop been an asshole, asshole.
- vemv 10y ago
  Just learn to use argumentation.
iheatu 10y ago
I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion, it's simply bad business at some point.
iheatu 10y ago
I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion, it's simply bad business. What is needed are un-biased assessments and non of these assessments are unbiased. They seem to try to correct the bias meter the most quick fix manner possible. People without skills with only spoil the diversity pool because they will poorly represent. I say this as an African person as well. I would not want this for myself. It's insulting.
- michaelbuddy 10y ago
  There's no point in letting diversity trainers in your door. They are unemployable leeches with made up social science degrees. And they themselves are racist. The good thing is their hypocrisy is easy to detect by anyone with a solid rational outlook on life and business.
nailer 10y ago
The proper way to fix unconscious bias is blind hiring, at least until the final stage. I know a bunch of people with CS degrees in the Unix world and they can't program, I know a bunch of people without them who can. The only test of skill is a test of skill. Blindly ask them both to make a thing, leave them alone for forty minutes to make it, and see who makes it better.
darod 10y ago
Not sure what this author is complaining about? The goal was to achieve diversity and they seemed to have done it by hiring an ex-googler who is female. The author seems to be giving a rant because he had to do more work than calling up his buddy. BTW Temple University is not an HBCU
- acctjustforyou 10y ago
  >BTW Temple University is not an HBCU Which means that instead of one HBCU being ranked on the US News list of best colleges for Computer Science [1] (albeit at the very bottom), there are zero.[2] [1] - http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-computer-science-schools/computer-science-rankings/ http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu... [2] - http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/hbcu http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
eva1984 10y ago
I think I probably guessed which company this is. But this doesn't smell right. Feels like a real-world version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
- castratikron 10y ago
  Reminds me of what geohot says about academia: "We get it, you can't do anything."
- yarper 10y ago
  This is a incredible video - thanks so much for sharing it.
- angersock 10y ago
  Video is a bit of a caricature, but unfortunately with only a little poking around one can find examples of similar behavior and views held online. :(
adomanico 10y ago
Hiring should be the sum of a "Skill" score and a "Culture Fit" score. "Diversity" shouldn't be apart of either of these scores. It shouldn't matter what race, religion or color you are.
- Grue3 10y ago
  "Culture Fit" is exactly where the bias creeps in, and what breeds monoculture. Skill should be the only indicator.
eastbayjake 10y ago
This is a strawman that doesn't even attempt a charitable summary of opposing arguments. There is one link to an actual opponent's arguments and it's some random consultant/speaker's blog, not anyone actually being paid to advise on tech hiring diversity. Here's an attempt at a charitable characterization: Lots of heuristics for quickly evaluating programming skill may inadvertently toss out qualified applicants or give an undeserved boost to unqualified applicants who tick off superficial traits. Instead of leaning so heavily on heuristics that might disproportionately favor white men, let's try to create hiring systems that fairly evaluate people on their merits and give people full opportunity to demonstrate their talents. We should also try to make people aware that humans can make unconsciously-biased decisions based on some deeply-hardwired evolutionary heuristics around race and gender, so they have the awareness and mental tools to recognize when unconscious bias is influencing their decisions.
- actionwords 10y ago
  protip: they don't favor white men -- Asians are vastly over represented in silicon valley. white men are actually underrepresented. your entire line of argumentation is off base.
thelock85 10y ago
Fascinating. It mostly seems you're company is taking a poor approach to diversity, and doing even worse at communicating and gaining buy-in from existing employees. With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. So perhaps the real issue is that the hiring process allows for "many engineers who are barely competent at their job." And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. But by your own admission, the bar is already low enough to admit false positives so I think you're conflating issues here. On a side note: holding your argument to be true, could the existence of barely competent engineers lead your article to a different title: "How my company is lowering the bar to accommodate privilege." I don't have that data, but could be an interesting followup!
- acctjustforyou 10y ago
  >With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. The top of a company's funnel could also be made more diverse by starting with "OK, there are 7+ billion people on the planet..." - that doesn't make it a good idea. >And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. That's how you handle a great volume of applicants - you look for indicators of skill. None of them are necessary or sufficient; they just increase the likelihood that this will be a good hire a little bit. Giving every single person who is able to use the "resume" template in Microsoft Word an in-person interview would catch those false negatives you're missing, but it would be ridiculously inefficient. Or am I to assume that when you want to hire a plumber you canvass your neighborhood door-to-door so you dont miss out on someone who might be qualified but just drummed out of the plumbing industry for institutional reasons? Although I do like how you dismissed points 2-8 with a simple handwaving of "elite males are more likely to score higher on these points, so they're no good." Not to mention the fact that that argument does virtually nothing to contracdict point #8. If youre someone who truly believes they're a Great Programmer Who's Not Being Given a Chance Due To White Male Supremacy, a github profile is the greatest arrow in your quiver that you could possibly dream of.
yarper 10y ago
I've actually been given the same advice on HN regarding "not looking for a portfolio" since it excludes women. I think it's pretty disparaging to say women don't have the time for writing some code outside of work because of childcare commitments (for everyone involved - including the father of the child who's immediately and implicitly branded as off-scene or not pulling his weight). "Cultural fit" in my experience has been equated to "is this person someone I can see five days a week, 8 hours a day without driving me potty". That seems fairly legitimate to me - and completely inclusive of everyone.
- danpalmer 10y ago
  I've been given the "not looking for a portfolio" one before, but it was explained in more detail to me as - to put work up online opens yourself up to criticism, and given the sexism in our industry, this criticism can more easily become abuse when targeted at women, and therefore there are a not-insignificant group of women who do not publish code on GitHub because of abuse - this issue affects men less, therefore, a 'portfolio' is a biased metric. I think it's still a useful metric, but would now not take a lack of portfolio as an outright negative, without other factors considered.
  - yarper 10y ago
    I agree that makes more sense than the childcare argument. I'd still wonder though - what are this person's interests in tech? What do they do in pursuing those interests? I think these are legitimate questions, since one of the best metrics for success in software is the level of interest you hold in it.
    - acctjustforyou 10y ago
      >I think these are legitimate questions They are, and the fact that you even have to defend asking them is a non-trivial indicator of how bat-shit crazy the thinking has gotten on this topic.
- ch4s3 10y ago
  I think a better way to put this would be, don't penalize women for not participating in open source. There are a number of societal/cultural factors that preclude or push women out of open source, so have some understanding of that when interviewing women.
ch4s3 10y ago
I'm sorry, but this post seems totally fabricated or at least intentionally misrepresenting what is happening. I spend a lot of time reading about diversity initiatives in tech and I'm trying to set up an initiative where I work. However, I've never heard anyone suggest lowering the bar in the ways listed in this article. The whole thing is constructed as reductio ad absurdum. For example: >Stop considering some colleges as better than other colleges because that’s racist No one says this, because it does not follow. One might say that it is important to recruit outside of the Ivies/Stanford, because you will miss qualified candidates who are otherwise pushed out of the industry despite their talent. Or: >Stop looking for people with relevant industry experience because it is sexist No one says that, ever. I think the original kernel of advice may have been, don't only post listings for people with 15 years of experience. Your crud app doesn't require that, so give someone a little greener a chance. I could go on, but this post is basically reactionary garbage. *edit for formatting
- rmartelli 10y ago
  Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. To eliminate structural sexism, we must remove hiring criteria that favors men. Let's tell our sourcers that looking for relevant industry experience is not important. For school I've been told that we should look if they have a degree or not, and not consider which institution. This explicitly considers all colleges the same. Every point in the post is an actual suggestion made on how to improve diversity. Obviously not all the suggestions have been implemented, but I'm afraid the committee for improving hiring might do just that.
  - ch4s3 10y ago
    >Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. I'm not saying this wasn't said, but I've literally never encountered this before today. Perhaps your company is approaching diversity the wrong way for the wrong reasons. To the point about the rankings of the colleges, it may matter less than you think. If you look at salary numbers over the lifetime of graduates, the ranking of their undergraduate has only a small effect for STEM majors. If you consider salary to be at least somewhat tethered to performance, this suggests that in the long run, the institution doesn't matter as much as the individual. There's some research around this, but I don't recall the authors at the moment. And, perhaps I'm wrong. I can imagine the differences are greater for recent grads. Again, if they're all "actual suggestions," that seem strange to me. I never see or hear those suggestions, and they seem to run counter to the way people who are writing thoughtfully about tech diversity approach the issue.
basseq 10y ago
This article is what happens when you push diversity by fiat and don't extend the initiative beyond recruiting. Even when programs like this are well-intentioned, you can see the extremely destructive fallout: the author and those like him are going to look at all "diverse" employees and think, "You got a free pass. You're not as good as everyone else." Let's flip all these changes around to show how it's not about "lowering the bar", it's about realizing that a one-size-fits-all "bar" isn't an effective hiring method in the long run. 1. Update your interview scoring methodology to account for non-traditional backgrounds. (Extra points for ethnicity, e.g., are a detrimental hack that shows how your system is broken.) 2. Don't discount candidates because of their degrees. (While a CS degree may be an indicator of qualification, its absence isn't a disqualifier.) 3. Don't discount candidates because of their educational institutions. (While a top college may be an indicator of quality, I'd rather hire the best candidate from a second- or third-tier school than a middling candidate from an Ivy.) 4. Expand your outbound candidate search to non-traditional channels. (See #3.) 5. Don't discount non-traditional industry experience. (A developer outside of the software industry may be just as good.) 6. Don't discount candidates because of their previous employers. (An ex-Googler may rightfully be an impressive candidate, but they also might be a low-performer.) 7. Don't conflate "years of experience" with "experience". (Very often, 15 years of experience is 1 year of experience repeated 15 times. No one has 15 years of experience in Node.js.) 8. Don't discount a lack of "extracurriculars" like OSS, volunteerism, or other factors. 9. Don't rely on referrals. (You can't staff a company entirely with "friends-of-friends".) All of these statements are focused on broadening your perspective and getting away from statistics. Yes, a Stanford CS major with 15 years of experience at Google and an awesome GitHub profile is probably a good candidate. But a developer from Temple with 8 years of experience in the retail industry may be just as good. Yes: it will take more effort to find those candidates, and your signal-to-noise ratio may go down, but your reward comes in the form of awesome people you never would have found before. Diversity will be a natural by-product, and a way to measure your progress.
dclowd9901 10y ago
OP is unbelievable. > I completely agree. I’ve interviewed people from MIT who weren’t familiar with a hash table and the best software developer I’ve worked with never went to college. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, didn’t go to a top CS school. However, it’s still the case that college and experience is an imperfect signal of ability. In other words: Here's all of these great reasons I've found not to trust someone's schooling as a good indicator of their ability, but I'm going to use it anyway. OP is what's wrong with tech hiring.
- acctjustforyou 10y ago
  "There exists a young man with no legs who has a stellar collegiate wrestling record. There also exists an athlete in the most prestigious wrestling program in the country who always loses because he never makes weight, and when he does make weight, he gets defeated in seconds. Therefore I can confidently conclude that 'number of limbs' has no correlation whatsoever to wrestling ability." Hmmm...
  - dclowd9901 10y ago
    Sounds like you get it.
alistproducer2 10y ago
The author refers to African-Americans as "blacks" numerous times. In my experience, the only people who use that terminology are racists. I can guarantee you the author is a huge fan of "The Bell Curve." This anecdote is clearly troll bait.
- angersock 10y ago
  Your experience appears to be limited.
  - alistproducer2 10y ago
    Not at all. I've never heard "blacks" used by a non-black person in a context that wasn't racially charged.
    - angersock 10y ago
      By the same logic, African-American never comes up without race being a significant part of the context. I'm mostly surprised because "African-American" is a mouthful compared to just "blacks", so I'm suspicious that in common language it is somehow limited only to racists. "Blacks" is also more accurate if you just want to refer to people by skin color (for whatever damn-fool reason).

67 points by rmartelli 10y ago

actionwords 10y ago

It sounds like you've had a bit too much to think. Calm down, take some Soma.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mseebach 10y ago

> My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education. This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity activist" might say something like that, but for a company of any sort of quality to just accept it and implement it, that's unrealistic. More realistically, what they may have implemented is something like accepting that people without CS degrees from top universities may still be perfectly capable software developers, which is true (being one, I'd like to think so, at least), but if that's the case, the article is grossly misrepresenting it.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cmdrfred 10y ago
By that logic shouldn't you not look at college degrees at all as more women hold degrees[0]? [0]http://time.com/4064665/women-college-degree/ http://time.com/4064665/women-college-degree/
pessimizer 10y ago
Since when did a college degree become a requirement for programming, or indicate a higher quality of programmer? I know CS graduates who have no ability to program. Half of these big companies have been started by dropouts, and the oldest ones were started when there was no such thing as a CS degree.
- acctjustforyou 10y ago
  The fact that a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good programmer does not mean it is a worthless data point.
  - dclowd9901 10y ago
    I'd say overwhelming evidence points to the exact contrary.
    - acctjustforyou 10y ago
      Sounds like you've found a great indicator of skill then - "does not have a CS degree."
      - dclowd9901 10y ago
        More like "possession of CS degree has no bearing whatsoever on skill, so ignore it."
rmartelli 10y ago
Sorry that it's hard to believe. My CEO was previously an activist so the people brought in to talk are definitely outside what you would expect in corporate America. Unfortunately it's hard to find sources for this except for internal videos. A quote from one of the trainers that gets at the same idea: "In sourcing diverse candidates, it is imperative to avoid criteria that are inherently biased, like using school selectivity and previous company as a proxy for performance or as a signal that someone is a strong candidate. Instead of focusing on previous companies or schools, which limits the talent pool, you should focus on relevant skills. For example, if Google is typically used as a signal that someone is a good candidate, push yourselves and your clients to articulate why that's the case. Is it the experience working at a large company that's useful?"
- mseebach 10y ago
  There's nothing in that quote that goes anywhere near "assum[ing] that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education".

pessimizer 10y ago

Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar." [points 2,3,4,5,6,7,9] In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost. [points 1,8] edit: and about "open source" contributions; ethnic minorities and women are far more likely to have worked in large corporations rather than in open source or startups, because those companies are held to a higher standard in their behavior towards minorities than the kind of self-assembling social clubs that this article (and site) are focused on. edit 2: I know (very closely) a woman who has been in IT for 40 years. She was an English major, and has absolutely no involvement with open source. She doesn't know people in startups. Why would someone presume that she doesn't know the job?

anothermoron 10y ago
But they're specificially asking to discriminate against certain applicants in favor of other. "Hire people from certain place instead of other" "Favor people who never worked in company like google" "Hire people from "bad" college instead of top one"
acctjustforyou 10y ago
>Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar." So, suppose you had to fill an open position for a developer and you had two candidates: an MIT grad with years of experience at Apple and Google, and a homeless guy who never went to college and never worked in IT before. You're honestly going to try to tell us that you have no idea who might be the better candidate? And if hypothetically you could only interview one, you'd what? Be totally stymied? Flip a coin maybe? There's no possible way you can actually believe what you're saying. >In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost. [points 1,8] I don't recall him mentioning ruling people out before speaking to them, although once you get to a certain scale that has to happen at some point since if an individual manager gets 1,000 applicants for one position on his team he can't speak to them all. Or is math racist too? The scale requirement becomes much smaller when talking about reviewing someone's work, because that is much more involved than a resume scan or even most phone screens. Giving them a diversity grade boost is the definition of racism/sexism/*ism. Funny how youve managed to find yourself on the same side as someone who gives a buxom under qualified blonde a second interview because "we don't have any hot chicks in this office."

gtirloni 10y ago

Some companies will rate applicants in a series of categories. Education and experience are the usual. Lately, "fit" has become extremely important to HR departments. It usually means people with the same culture, race, age, music and sports tastes, etc. If your company thinks it has a diversity problem, it's probably related to "fit". My suggestion is to continue to filter people out based on education and experience equally and give a boost in the "fit" category to categories of people that are minorities in your company. I think that's perfectly fair to offset internal biases. EDIT: I get it some people are arguing that, by filtering on education/experience, there won't be any minorities left to be "boosted" in the "fit" category. If it is THAT bad, the company can try to expand who it's reaching out to but I understand that's a bigger problem (e.g. company in SV cannot afford relocation costs and thus has to look for local candidates only will not help with the diversity issue).

meira 10y ago

Just stop been an asshole, asshole.

vemv 10y ago
Just learn to use argumentation.

iheatu 10y ago

I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion, it's simply bad business. What is needed are un-biased assessments and non of these assessments are unbiased. They seem to try to correct the bias meter the most quick fix manner possible. People without skills with only spoil the diversity pool because they will poorly represent. I say this as an African person as well. I would not want this for myself. It's insulting.

michaelbuddy 10y ago
There's no point in letting diversity trainers in your door. They are unemployable leeches with made up social science degrees. And they themselves are racist. The good thing is their hypocrisy is easy to detect by anyone with a solid rational outlook on life and business.

nailer 10y ago

The proper way to fix unconscious bias is blind hiring, at least until the final stage. I know a bunch of people with CS degrees in the Unix world and they can't program, I know a bunch of people without them who can. The only test of skill is a test of skill. Blindly ask them both to make a thing, leave them alone for forty minutes to make it, and see who makes it better.

darod 10y ago

Not sure what this author is complaining about? The goal was to achieve diversity and they seemed to have done it by hiring an ex-googler who is female. The author seems to be giving a rant because he had to do more work than calling up his buddy. BTW Temple University is not an HBCU

acctjustforyou 10y ago
>BTW Temple University is not an HBCU Which means that instead of one HBCU being ranked on the US News list of best colleges for Computer Science [1] (albeit at the very bottom), there are zero.[2] [1] - http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-computer-science-schools/computer-science-rankings/ http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu... [2] - http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/hbcu http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

eva1984 10y ago

I think I probably guessed which company this is. But this doesn't smell right. Feels like a real-world version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM

castratikron 10y ago
Reminds me of what geohot says about academia: "We get it, you can't do anything."
yarper 10y ago
This is a incredible video - thanks so much for sharing it.
angersock 10y ago
Video is a bit of a caricature, but unfortunately with only a little poking around one can find examples of similar behavior and views held online. :(

adomanico 10y ago

Hiring should be the sum of a "Skill" score and a "Culture Fit" score. "Diversity" shouldn't be apart of either of these scores. It shouldn't matter what race, religion or color you are.

Grue3 10y ago
"Culture Fit" is exactly where the bias creeps in, and what breeds monoculture. Skill should be the only indicator.

eastbayjake 10y ago

This is a strawman that doesn't even attempt a charitable summary of opposing arguments. There is one link to an actual opponent's arguments and it's some random consultant/speaker's blog, not anyone actually being paid to advise on tech hiring diversity. Here's an attempt at a charitable characterization: Lots of heuristics for quickly evaluating programming skill may inadvertently toss out qualified applicants or give an undeserved boost to unqualified applicants who tick off superficial traits. Instead of leaning so heavily on heuristics that might disproportionately favor white men, let's try to create hiring systems that fairly evaluate people on their merits and give people full opportunity to demonstrate their talents. We should also try to make people aware that humans can make unconsciously-biased decisions based on some deeply-hardwired evolutionary heuristics around race and gender, so they have the awareness and mental tools to recognize when unconscious bias is influencing their decisions.

actionwords 10y ago
protip: they don't favor white men -- Asians are vastly over represented in silicon valley. white men are actually underrepresented. your entire line of argumentation is off base.

thelock85 10y ago

Fascinating. It mostly seems you're company is taking a poor approach to diversity, and doing even worse at communicating and gaining buy-in from existing employees. With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. So perhaps the real issue is that the hiring process allows for "many engineers who are barely competent at their job." And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. But by your own admission, the bar is already low enough to admit false positives so I think you're conflating issues here. On a side note: holding your argument to be true, could the existence of barely competent engineers lead your article to a different title: "How my company is lowering the bar to accommodate privilege." I don't have that data, but could be an interesting followup!

acctjustforyou 10y ago
>With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. The top of a company's funnel could also be made more diverse by starting with "OK, there are 7+ billion people on the planet..." - that doesn't make it a good idea. >And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. That's how you handle a great volume of applicants - you look for indicators of skill. None of them are necessary or sufficient; they just increase the likelihood that this will be a good hire a little bit. Giving every single person who is able to use the "resume" template in Microsoft Word an in-person interview would catch those false negatives you're missing, but it would be ridiculously inefficient. Or am I to assume that when you want to hire a plumber you canvass your neighborhood door-to-door so you dont miss out on someone who might be qualified but just drummed out of the plumbing industry for institutional reasons? Although I do like how you dismissed points 2-8 with a simple handwaving of "elite males are more likely to score higher on these points, so they're no good." Not to mention the fact that that argument does virtually nothing to contracdict point #8. If youre someone who truly believes they're a Great Programmer Who's Not Being Given a Chance Due To White Male Supremacy, a github profile is the greatest arrow in your quiver that you could possibly dream of.

yarper 10y ago

I've actually been given the same advice on HN regarding "not looking for a portfolio" since it excludes women. I think it's pretty disparaging to say women don't have the time for writing some code outside of work because of childcare commitments (for everyone involved - including the father of the child who's immediately and implicitly branded as off-scene or not pulling his weight). "Cultural fit" in my experience has been equated to "is this person someone I can see five days a week, 8 hours a day without driving me potty". That seems fairly legitimate to me - and completely inclusive of everyone.

danpalmer 10y ago
I've been given the "not looking for a portfolio" one before, but it was explained in more detail to me as - to put work up online opens yourself up to criticism, and given the sexism in our industry, this criticism can more easily become abuse when targeted at women, and therefore there are a not-insignificant group of women who do not publish code on GitHub because of abuse - this issue affects men less, therefore, a 'portfolio' is a biased metric. I think it's still a useful metric, but would now not take a lack of portfolio as an outright negative, without other factors considered.
- yarper 10y ago
  I agree that makes more sense than the childcare argument. I'd still wonder though - what are this person's interests in tech? What do they do in pursuing those interests? I think these are legitimate questions, since one of the best metrics for success in software is the level of interest you hold in it.
  - acctjustforyou 10y ago
    >I think these are legitimate questions They are, and the fact that you even have to defend asking them is a non-trivial indicator of how bat-shit crazy the thinking has gotten on this topic.
ch4s3 10y ago
I think a better way to put this would be, don't penalize women for not participating in open source. There are a number of societal/cultural factors that preclude or push women out of open source, so have some understanding of that when interviewing women.

ch4s3 10y ago

I'm sorry, but this post seems totally fabricated or at least intentionally misrepresenting what is happening. I spend a lot of time reading about diversity initiatives in tech and I'm trying to set up an initiative where I work. However, I've never heard anyone suggest lowering the bar in the ways listed in this article. The whole thing is constructed as reductio ad absurdum. For example: >Stop considering some colleges as better than other colleges because that’s racist No one says this, because it does not follow. One might say that it is important to recruit outside of the Ivies/Stanford, because you will miss qualified candidates who are otherwise pushed out of the industry despite their talent. Or: >Stop looking for people with relevant industry experience because it is sexist No one says that, ever. I think the original kernel of advice may have been, don't only post listings for people with 15 years of experience. Your crud app doesn't require that, so give someone a little greener a chance. I could go on, but this post is basically reactionary garbage. *edit for formatting

rmartelli 10y ago
Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. To eliminate structural sexism, we must remove hiring criteria that favors men. Let's tell our sourcers that looking for relevant industry experience is not important. For school I've been told that we should look if they have a degree or not, and not consider which institution. This explicitly considers all colleges the same. Every point in the post is an actual suggestion made on how to improve diversity. Obviously not all the suggestions have been implemented, but I'm afraid the committee for improving hiring might do just that.
- ch4s3 10y ago
  >Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. I'm not saying this wasn't said, but I've literally never encountered this before today. Perhaps your company is approaching diversity the wrong way for the wrong reasons. To the point about the rankings of the colleges, it may matter less than you think. If you look at salary numbers over the lifetime of graduates, the ranking of their undergraduate has only a small effect for STEM majors. If you consider salary to be at least somewhat tethered to performance, this suggests that in the long run, the institution doesn't matter as much as the individual. There's some research around this, but I don't recall the authors at the moment. And, perhaps I'm wrong. I can imagine the differences are greater for recent grads. Again, if they're all "actual suggestions," that seem strange to me. I never see or hear those suggestions, and they seem to run counter to the way people who are writing thoughtfully about tech diversity approach the issue.

basseq 10y ago

This article is what happens when you push diversity by fiat and don't extend the initiative beyond recruiting. Even when programs like this are well-intentioned, you can see the extremely destructive fallout: the author and those like him are going to look at all "diverse" employees and think, "You got a free pass. You're not as good as everyone else." Let's flip all these changes around to show how it's not about "lowering the bar", it's about realizing that a one-size-fits-all "bar" isn't an effective hiring method in the long run. 1. Update your interview scoring methodology to account for non-traditional backgrounds. (Extra points for ethnicity, e.g., are a detrimental hack that shows how your system is broken.) 2. Don't discount candidates because of their degrees. (While a CS degree may be an indicator of qualification, its absence isn't a disqualifier.) 3. Don't discount candidates because of their educational institutions. (While a top college may be an indicator of quality, I'd rather hire the best candidate from a second- or third-tier school than a middling candidate from an Ivy.) 4. Expand your outbound candidate search to non-traditional channels. (See #3.) 5. Don't discount non-traditional industry experience. (A developer outside of the software industry may be just as good.) 6. Don't discount candidates because of their previous employers. (An ex-Googler may rightfully be an impressive candidate, but they also might be a low-performer.) 7. Don't conflate "years of experience" with "experience". (Very often, 15 years of experience is 1 year of experience repeated 15 times. No one has 15 years of experience in Node.js.) 8. Don't discount a lack of "extracurriculars" like OSS, volunteerism, or other factors. 9. Don't rely on referrals. (You can't staff a company entirely with "friends-of-friends".) All of these statements are focused on broadening your perspective and getting away from statistics. Yes, a Stanford CS major with 15 years of experience at Google and an awesome GitHub profile is probably a good candidate. But a developer from Temple with 8 years of experience in the retail industry may be just as good. Yes: it will take more effort to find those candidates, and your signal-to-noise ratio may go down, but your reward comes in the form of awesome people you never would have found before. Diversity will be a natural by-product, and a way to measure your progress.

dclowd9901 10y ago

OP is unbelievable. > I completely agree. I’ve interviewed people from MIT who weren’t familiar with a hash table and the best software developer I’ve worked with never went to college. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, didn’t go to a top CS school. However, it’s still the case that college and experience is an imperfect signal of ability. In other words: Here's all of these great reasons I've found not to trust someone's schooling as a good indicator of their ability, but I'm going to use it anyway. OP is what's wrong with tech hiring.

acctjustforyou 10y ago
"There exists a young man with no legs who has a stellar collegiate wrestling record. There also exists an athlete in the most prestigious wrestling program in the country who always loses because he never makes weight, and when he does make weight, he gets defeated in seconds. Therefore I can confidently conclude that 'number of limbs' has no correlation whatsoever to wrestling ability." Hmmm...
- dclowd9901 10y ago
  Sounds like you get it.

alistproducer2 10y ago

The author refers to African-Americans as "blacks" numerous times. In my experience, the only people who use that terminology are racists. I can guarantee you the author is a huge fan of "The Bell Curve." This anecdote is clearly troll bait.

angersock 10y ago
Your experience appears to be limited.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  Not at all. I've never heard "blacks" used by a non-black person in a context that wasn't racially charged.
  - angersock 10y ago
    By the same logic, African-American never comes up without race being a significant part of the context. I'm mostly surprised because "African-American" is a mouthful compared to just "blacks", so I'm suspicious that in common language it is somehow limited only to racists. "Blacks" is also more accurate if you just want to refer to people by skin color (for whatever damn-fool reason).