27 ms·

Ask a Female Engineer: Interviewing and Company Culture

161 points by craigcannon 10y ago

anon839 10y ago
I find that minorities harass women in the street more than other races. And this harassment continues into the office. If we are serious about increasing the number of minorities, there should be some sort of training about what sort of behavior is acceptable and what isn't. Otherwise I don't want to see more minorities in tech.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please don't create new accounts to violate the guidelines with. We ban them, and then ban the main account if it continues.
  - MustardTiger 10y ago
    Even after re-reading the guidelines, I still don't know which one that post is violating. Which guideline are you referring to?
    - dang 10y ago
      I think the casual slur of 'minorities' counts as flamewar material. Perhaps there's a reasonable discussion to be had (though it's likely beyond HN's tolerance) about how race and gender issues complicate each other, including in the tech world, but a comment like this one isn't it.
      - bshimmin 10y ago
        I agree that the comment is not good, but is "minority" really a slur?
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        DanBC 10y ago
        The word minority isn't a slur, the statement "minorities harass women in the street more than other races" is.
        bshimmin 10y ago
        Have you seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Hours_of_Walking_in_NYC_as_a_Woman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Hours_of_Walking_in_NYC_as_... ? That statement, slur or no, was certainly one of the main points of contention of that video.
        DanBC 10y ago
        Was it? From the article you posted: > even though the video creator said that she was catcalled by people of all races > Hollaback! responded to the criticism by noting that this video was only the first in a series of many videos that would document different forms of street harassment, and said it regretted any racial bias in the video.[12][13] An analysis of the video documented that most of the scenes shown in the video were taken in neighborhoods with predominantly black and Hispanic populations, raising the question of whether the video was shot mostly in these locations, or whether harassment was more prevalent in these locations than in others. Your summary is dishonestly inaccurate.
        jshevek 10y ago
        > An analysis of the video documented that most of the scenes shown in the video were taken in neighborhoods with predominantly black and Hispanic populations They said they filmed 10 hours of video and then apparently chose the worst instances for their much briefer video showing harassment. It's quite possible that she walked through many different neighborhoods, but those hours of walking simply didn't produce the harassment desired for the video.
      - jshevek 10y ago
        Can you clarify this? Are HN posters allowed to use the term 'minorities'? Are posters allowed to comment on perceived differences of behavior among different demographics?
        tomhoward 10y ago
        Any words are allowed on HN, as are any comments that are civil, substantive and (sincerely intended to be) intellectually gratifying. With that in mind, the above comment certainly missed the mark.
        jshevek 10y ago
        It seems to me that you and Dang may not agree on Dang's statement. You say that any words are allowed on HN, while Dang said: "I think the casual slur of 'minorities' counts as flamewar material." and I would still like clarification as to whether the word itself - minorities - is considered a slur and inappropriate to HN, or whether it simply considered a 'slur' in this context. If the later, I would like clarification on that. I'm not aware of any quality studies that address this issue, but it may indeed be a matter of fact that in 2016 in the US, black men engage in a disproportionate amount of 'street harassment'. Its still unclear to me whether HN posters are forbidden from discussing this possibility. Edit: I find the suggestion that certain demographics should be targeted for anti-harassment training offensive in the extreme and can see why many people would prefer not to have this kind of content on HN. I just think we should strive for objective rules and apply them evenly.
        tomhoward 10y ago
        I'm quite sure dang was referring to the way the word 'minorities' was used, not the use of the word itself. Remember the comment was "I find that minorities harass women in the street more than other races". Given how broad the terms "minorities" and "other races" are, it's an utterly meaningless statement that serves only to inflame. If you search the comments you'll find plenty of civil uses of the word "minorities", with no objection from the mods. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minorities&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minorities&sort=byPopularity&p...
      - MustardTiger 10y ago
        "Minorities" is not a slur, it is a normal word that means "people who are in the minority". I don't see how that comment is not part of a reasonable discussion. Just because you don't like the fact being mentioned?
        dang 10y ago
        Obviously the word 'minority' was not the slur.
        MustardTiger 10y ago
        That's not obvious from your post, your statement clearly says it was. It was even quoted. It is obvious from the original post, but it is equally obvious that nothing else was a slur either, the post contained no slurs.
kafkaesq 10y ago
In terms of the interview itself – I hate pop-quiz-style rapid-fire questions. Things like “What is the time complexity of bubble sort? What is hopscotch hashing? What’s the CAP theorem?” And on and on for fifteen minutes and twenty-odd questions. But how else is the interviewer going to prove how smart they are, and signal their dominant status to you?
- justicezyx 10y ago
  The word is "hate", so it seems to be a personal taste. So the question does not naturally follow.
- solipsism 10y ago
  Why are you so cynical about this? Don't attribute to malice what is explainable by ignorance.
  - tzar 10y ago
    It's muddied somewhat by the sarcasm, but malice isn't necessarily implied nor salient in the OP's point.
  - geofft 10y ago
    What room is there for ignorance in figuring out how to conduct a technical interview?
    - solipsism 10y ago
      Are you joking? Interviewing involves many skills. Technical interviewing moreso
      - geofft 10y ago
        Right. So why would we be forgiving of people being ignorant about it? I mean, yes, it's certainly possible to be ignorant about it, lots of people are. But unless you somehow want to hire people who are completely uncorrelated with being good employees, the distinction between unwittingly and wittingly being a terrible interviewer seems a bit thin.
acaciapalm 10y ago
I am glad she mentioned how awful it is to have only one female employee. I was the only woman in an office. One of my co workers made a pretty horrific comment (not about me, but about women in front of me). Someone went to HR and we had sensitivity training...but everyone assumed it was me because I was the only woman. Maybe I SHOULD have gone to HR, but I didn't want to because I feared being the obvious complainant. Which I ended up getting the side-eye for anyway. I realized I would much rather work somewhere with at least 2 other women.
- SolarNet 10y ago
  Yea that was an idea I got out of this that I think will take to heart, at the very least teams should have a couple of women in them, even if it might make one team all men (the 15% women in tech number is really annoying; the better solution would just be to have half of each team be women).
- colmvp 10y ago
  I'm not sure how much this has to do with quantity of x as opposed to quality of x. I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism. I've also worked in teams where it's been highly diverse in ethnicity though not gender, and again, never noticed any hints of sexism. Though I have certainly worked in a company with a number of women, including a female co-founder/CEO who was absolutely sexist... against women. I'm not suggesting women are bad CEO's or that diversity is bad, I'm saying that from my experience, it hasn't been about the diversity of the team so much as the type of people in the composition. Also from my POV, I'm not sure how having a random % of women makes more or less sense than a random % of black people or Latino's. Like if a company is predominantly composed of white men, does adding a white female make it more diverse than adding a black man?
  - r00fus 10y ago
    > I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism. I don't think your situations are comparable. Women are ~50% of the population and sexual undertones have nothing to do with ethnicity, but everything to do with gender.
rifung 10y ago
> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].” Some recruiters are seriously sketchy. Someone I know joined a company where the recruiter told her that they give all their employees at that level this same salary so there's no room for negotiation unfortunately. After she joined, she asked what other people were making, and found out that even a new grad had higher compensation than she did despite the fact she had several years of experience already. Apparently, they tried to do the same thing to that other employee, but that other employee had another offer and just said that he would take the other offer, to which the recruiter apparently responded, "Oh wait, I'm sorry actually I think we can do something about that. I was looking at the wrong sheet."
- dominotw 10y ago
  > Someone I know joined a company where the recruiter told her that they give all their employees at that level this same salary so there's no room for negotiation unfortunately. Oh wow. this happened to me recently. I foolishly believed that it was true since I've heard of companies like Reddit that have policies like these.
  - jghn 10y ago
    At this point I'm always going to fall into one of two boats: 1) I don't need a job. You'll pay me what I want or no deal. In those cases things like what this recruiter pulled won't work. 2) I need a job. In this case it doesn't really matter to me.
    - praneshp 10y ago
      I have always been in (1) or (2), but can think of (3) I'd love to be at this job (because of company mission, etc) . Maybe it is a subcase of (2)?
      - Fej 10y ago
        I think that would be a subcase of (1). Would be "give me what I want" which would be other reasons than "pay me what I want".
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
chris_7 10y ago
> Founders can use tools like Culture Amp to do anonymous surveys. I wouldn't respond to one of those truthfully - I give four or five stars on everything, and never write any complaints in the free-form text fields. If possible, I just avoid doing them - especially if it's a small company, but at larger companies they tend to be per-team, so it works out the same.
- milesokeefe 10y ago
  It's a good idea to have that policy and be careful. I submitted a comment in a similar office survey service and despite my submission being anonymous, shortly after submitting it, a superior had a meeting with me to address what the anonymous complaint was about, having determined the comment was from me. In this case I was very glad they figured it out because it ended up being a low risk way of bringing up my concern, but had I not had such a great employer, the result could have been me getting fired or something similar. The comment was only one short sentence and there were 50-100 people employed at the company, so if you want to be honest on platforms like this, I would limit what you say and obfuscate as much as you can. It doesn't take much to identify you.
  - josephg 10y ago
    > ... but had I not had such a great employer ... > despite my submission being anonymous, shortly after submitting it, a superior had a meeting with me I'm glad you had a good experience, but a great employer wouldn't have lied to you about the survey being anonymous.
    - dlgeek 10y ago
      There's a difference between "This survey is anonymous"/"Hey, Bob ranked his satisfaction with his manager as 1/5", and "This survey is anonymous"/"Here's a list of complaints from your team"/"Oh, this one is a complaint about how X impacts Y - I know Bob's the only one who's expressed interest in that in the past, I bet it's from him". If my employer told me a survey was anonymous, I would expect anonymity on the Rank/Rate/True-False type questions, but assume that any freeform comments would be identifiable to someone as being from me based on style, content or something else.
exstudent2 10y ago
> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].” This has happened to me multiple times, most frequently when the company was offering a below-market compensation package. This happens to men and women. Recruiters suck, it's not a gender bias in most cases, it's that the role attracts a certain kind of person. A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. The fact is our industry has a lot of money in it and that attracts all kinds of jerks/sharks/shady people. Men deal with all of this on a daily basis as well. I'm just starting to think we don't spend as much time organizing as a group and instead just put our heads down and take it/fight through it in isolation.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > This happens to men and women > A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. ...and so this is one more example of where feminism helps everyone.
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    Not really, because optimizing for the wrong thing means you can make changes that hurt everybody and mistakenly think you've helped. Take Reddit's move of banning salary negotiations: control over how the surplus of the employment relationship is broken up was taken completely out of the hands of the employee. All employees (including women) are hurt by this, and yet a blinkered model that sees nothing but gender disparity would celebrate this as a narrowing of a gender gap. There are smart ways to address disparate-impact gender gaps, but insisting that feminism is the only lens through which to view a problem is not one of them.
    - chris_7 10y ago
      In a salary-negotiation-banned situation, are you also typically prohibited from exchanging salary for vacation, while maintaining the same perceived total compensation?
- wutbrodo 10y ago
rubicon33 10y ago
> "As opposed to fox-and-hare looped link lists or implementing a binary tree or something else I’ve done a hundred times in an interview and not once in my actual job." This. Interviewers, stop asking questions that only a fresh college grad should have at the forefront of their mind. One of the best interview's I've had, was actually for a job I didn't get. It was for a game development company, and they actually posed problems and questions one might face in their day to day work. For example, writing an efficient collision detection algorithm.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > This. Interviewers, stop asking questions that only a fresh college grad should have at the forefront of their mind. These aren't questions "only a college grad should know" they're often questions that are baseline knowledge for understanding programming vs just having a few rote cargo cult "skills". I have been on both sides of the interview process at Google, and I remember when I was prepping to conduct my first interview, one of my teammates gave me some advice. He suggested I open with something along the lines of "merge two sorted lists". Someone who couldn't do this with a minimum of effort barely fits the definition of "knowing how to program" (let alone being a good engineer). And yet, a non trivial chunk of the candidates he had met with didn't clear this bar! Starting with an assumption that your candidate can handle complex questions when they can't even program can just muddle the issue, and there's very little advantage to skipping over the basic test. Bear in mind that this was at Google, and these were candidates who had already made it past the first line filter.
  - _RPM 10y ago
    Consider the fact that coding under pressure is hard and it probably doesn't mean that the candidate is incapable of merging two sorted lists. Right now I can think of a way to do it: var ar = []; ar1.map(function() { ar.push(arguments[0]); } ar2.map(function() { ar.push(arguments[0]); } However, under pressure it's so much different than responding to a comment. This is for sure a great question to ask.
    - 10y ago
jkot 10y ago
In my experience distributed company is best if you want diverse team from start. I worked at company where 70% of engineers were women.
- FT_intern 10y ago
  The percent of female CS graduates is ~20-30%. Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate % considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    It's just as sexist but it's not PC to stand up for the rights of men or white people.
  - mrkurt 10y ago
    I don't think companies are considered sexist based on the ratio of men/women. They're considered sexist when they _act_ sexist and don't work very hard to cultivate a good environment.
    - Crito 10y ago
      > considered By whom?
    - hueving 10y ago
      It is. Companies like Google are frequently hounded to find out 'what they are doing about their gender crisis' even though their numbers reflect graduation ratios.
      - mrkurt 10y ago
        I think there are a lot of groups that have an obligation to change things, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad either. Google is big enough to actually affect the up stream numbers, I'm glad they're working at it.
jomamaxx 10y ago
"It’s important to me that recruiters and interviewers are respectful. Nothing is worse than a condescending interviewer." What does this have to do with 'female'? This is the norm in high tech for everyone - sadly. Am I under the impression that this girl thinks that she's being singled out as a girl on this? Because I got it most of the time during my career. Not saying it's right, but I don't think it's a gender issue.
- slavik81 10y ago
  My understanding is that this article series is not about experiences that are uniquely female. Rather, it's just generally about the experiences of female engineers. Many experiences are likely to be the same as for a male engineer, but not all. I really like this approach, as I think it makes it easier to understand their perspective.
  - cbcowans 10y ago
    Yes that's exactly it. Glad you like the approach.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Because interviewers are more likely to be condescending to someone they don't respect, and many of them don't respect women. Yes, this stuff happens to many people, not just women. But it happens to them on an alarmingly regular basis.
  - lazaroclapp 10y ago
    That's the extreme case, but there is also the less malicious one where because of stereotypes and average distributions at a particular company, people just assume women they are speaking to to be less technical than they are and try to 'helpfully' explain things at an unnecessarily basic level. Say, a system's engineer explaining their work to a female college as if she were a front end developer by default, where they would ask a male college what their experience was before making that assumption. This is an easy mistake to make if you are a kernel hacker in an organization that has, say 20% female developers overall, but where only 2% of kernel hackers are women. Easy to make, not malicious, but not much less annoying because of it, specially if you are the 10th person to assume that. From your point of view, it is a very efficient cache prediction strategy, since you'll get it right 90% of the time[1], but from theirs, it means half their queries end up miss-predicted... [1] Yes, I am assuming 50% of all developers are kernel hackers, you can switch to something more realistic like product vs infra, front vs backend, etc. Also, the point is not about "lower-level systems programming being real-er programming!", but about making assumptions based partly on gender.
sergiotapia 10y ago
She mentions to make an effort towards diversity at the end. As a latino, diversity for diversity sake never made sense to me. What am I a lego piece or something? Meritocracy.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Same here, it's not like you're re-populating the planet where diversity is important.
- carapace 10y ago
  Even if you're not into diversity for it's own sake, there's still the situation where someone who merits it less gets a job over someone who merits it more, due to their ethnicity.
- girvo 10y ago
  Diversity of experiences and opinions are good, in my opinion, because they allow problems to be approached in ways that I wouldn't otherwise have considered, if it was a singular mono-culture.
  - atom-morgan 10y ago
    But diversity in tech usually revolves around skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.
    - aplusbi 10y ago
      Which is a very, very good proxy for diversity of experience and opinion.
      - brighteyes 10y ago
        It might be, but political affiliation, religion, and age would be equally good proxies. But these aspects rarely if at all get addressed.
      - 10y ago
toomanybeersies 10y ago
> There’s another side to the equation too, which is being a female interviewer meeting with male candidates... it will subtly or overtly turn into a situation where the candidate is speaking and addressing questions or answers to my coworker. This happens even when I am leading the interview... I wonder if this goes both ways. If a male was leading the interview, and they were interviewing a female, would the interviewee tend to talk to the female interviewer?
- jrnichols 10y ago
  > would the interviewee tend to talk to the female interviewer? In my experience, yes, this definitely happens.
stephenboyd 10y ago
A former classmate of mine posted on her blog yesterday about some of her tech interview experiences. She didn't generalize about inclusive culture, but her perspective is enlightening. http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/10/5/a-few-stories-of-tech-interviews http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/10/5/a-few-stories-of...
- thedufer 10y ago
  Perfect correlation between good interviews and getting an offer does not inspire confidence in how accurate the descriptions are. Times like these you want to hear the other side of the story.
  - stephenboyd 10y ago
    If an excellent candidate doesn't get an offer, it's probable that something went wrong in the interview process. And if there are only three examples of rejections, there's not enough data to talk about unexpected correlations.
    - thedufer 10y ago
      > If an excellent candidate doesn't get an offer, it's probable that something went wrong in the interview process Google sees about half of their employees come from at least a second interview attempt, implying that qualified people fail at least 1/2 the time. Maybe you're claiming that their process is terrible? Or that most companies are significantly better at hiring than them? As the only data point I can find, though, it seems pretty damning. > And if there are only three examples of rejections It's unclear to me why only rejections count. 7 for 7 is a lot more concerning than 3 for 3. FTR, out of the 6 interview processes I've gone through I can think of 2 that don't correlate in this way (one in each direction). So I think I have some basis for suspicion.
- random314 10y ago
  Looks like she really dislikes being asked to code in an interview. She just wants to have a friendly conversation. She will be a great fit for consulting firms that bill by the hour.
_RPM 10y ago
What's the hidden message behind being late to an interview?
- AlexCoventry 10y ago
  The article implies it suggests that the late employees are inconsiderate or can't "execute."
balls187 10y ago
Implement bubble sort? That's a terrible question.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Great work doing this and good luck. Have a couple of ignorant questions: 1). Is it correct that there is no consensus on say, the top three reasons that females are under represented in computer science? It's frustrating that so many lay people voice just opinions and anecdotes. Is the real research starting to agree on what are the most important factors yet? 2) Some people say genetics is one reason females are underrepresented. For example they say, maybe on average females simply tend to be less interested in the subject. Is there any data that actually supports, or excludes this notion?
- hesarenu 10y ago
  Might be representative of the west. Good number of females are seen in Indian companies. But they usually drop off after getting married.
- cauterized 10y ago
  For point 2, that's what they said about medicine, law, pretty much any other male-dominated field you can name. Even if there's a difference in interest among adults, why should that difference in interest be due to genetic factors rather than cultural differences in how we raise boys vs girls and how teens are peer pressured? Edited to add: by the way, back in the 50s and 60s, computer programming was female-dominated.
  - tomp 10y ago
    That's actually not true. There is a graph that's often used to support this point [1]. But using a better graph, we can see that CS is in line with engineering (CS is definitely more "engineering" than it is "science") [2]. [1] https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide-4b0beb106fe1b4cfabd9799accb65e8ef8097473.jpg?s=1400 https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide... [2] https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg
- notgood 10y ago
  Nope. There is no consensus. Sociology, psychology and biology are all intertwined as part of the reason so conclusions are heavily based on interpretations (therefore open to bias). I think the closest ones to the truth are those who explore the early years and how they relate to the careers they will choose. For example this study[0] on neonatal babies (meaning not yet influenced by culture/society) concluded that males are more interested by mechanics and females ate more interested in faces; reinforcing the idea that females are more social oriented and males more exploration oriented. By the way, one of the reasons there is no consensus is the controversy that generates reaching any conclusion that is not "it's just that society is sexist" [0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300000321 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300...
superpope99 10y ago
It tickles me that they have an Ada and a Grace representing women.
- detaro 10y ago
  The names are pseudonyms
happyslobro 10y ago
A while ago, I worked with an all male team of about 20 programmers. The odd thing was, though, that there were a lot of women writing code, but not officially as production programmers. They were in high level support positions, mainly working on infrastructure and data, and helping my team work within in their system. This role is now commonly referred to as dev-ops or data analyst, elsewhere, and pays very well. But, because their job title was "L2 support", they were paid less and missed out on a bunch of perks. I had a friend in "support" who had build a lot of a data normalization system that I often worked with, and we talked about the phenomenon a couple times over lunch. Basically, she was a little offended about the lower pay and the "support" title, but would rather keep her work / life balance and relatively powerful position within the infrastructure stack, than join the production team for a raise. In hindsight, someone should have fought for the whole L2 support department to be better paid; there was certainly money for that (we were in a wildly profitable niche), and the support engineers had the high ground. But we were both young technical types, and didn't have the business / legal skills or the confidence to confront management. I'm not sure how things have played out there in the years since I left, but if they wanted to, that entire L2 support team could take off and form a devops / analytics consulting firm, and probably multiply their incomes by some small integers. Then they could hire from the product team too, if they needed web/UI ;)
bandrami 10y ago
This is why I love working at companies with open books. All of our salaries are posted on our intranet, along with every other expense the company has. It only works when the company is entirely self-funded, though, so it takes a little hunting to find them. (We also have 100% open meetings except for HR issues, which I've come to love too -- it's cool to be able to see what sales or R&D are up to).
ryanmarsh 10y ago
This is why I taught my daughters the four magic words when it comes to getting paid: FUCK YOU PAY ME It's all about an aggressive attitude towards compensation. It's why I make so much and others whom I believe deserve more than me do not. They just aren't aggressive enough. You have to be aggressive by default when it comes to compensation. It's not about the words per se, but the attitude.
geebee 10y ago
Part of the problem here is that I think we, in tech, have really forgotten how stressful it is to be given a technical exam at a whiteboard, especially with an undercurrent of finding charlatans who "can't even do basic programming!" Many people from other professions and graduate programs describe their oral exams as among the most stressful academic experiences they've been through, because it's unusually embarrassing to fail publicly and people are afraid of "freezing". And that's when there's a pretty clear and well publicized study route, with an ostensibly consistently graded exam, with professors and/or industry practitioners who are experts in their field, with feedback and mechanisms to ensure fairness and integrity. We get all the stress, but none of the protections, in tech. And we never really get to stop doing it. I've been through the washing machine enough times that I am pretty resistant to it, though it does still get to me as well. Early career, I did feel pretty humiliated after some of these experiences. Sometimes, I think we lose sight of this. When I described what it was like to "interview" at google and other places, people outside tech kind of shuddered. Their interviews are more like conversations - yes, you need to know what you're talking about, but you don't stand in front of a committee, at a whiteboard, getting treated like a grad student going through quals (if only!) every single time you interview at a new company! I've heard some questions about whether this is just an inevitable part of being a programmer. If it is, fine, but then please, let's stop scratching our heads about why there's a supposed "shortage" of programmers. If an extremely unpleasant quasi-hazing is a necessary part of applying for a developer job (every single time), then let's not be surprised when people decide they don't want to work in this field anymore, don't want to enter it in the first place, are reluctant to change jobs, or, alternatively, prefer careers in actuarial work, law, medicine, nursing, or other fields where they get to take their exams under conditions that are far more respectful of the candidate and result in a lasting, meaningful credential, respected in their field, so they don't have to do it over and over.
- scsilver 10y ago
  Further more, we have legal protections for those with disabilities when taking these certifications that is not accounted for in the tech sector. http://www.americanbar.org/groups/disabilityrights/resources/biad.html http://www.americanbar.org/groups/disabilityrights/resources... http://ncees.org/exams/special-accommodations/ada-exam-accommodations/ http://ncees.org/exams/special-accommodations/ada-exam-accom... http://www.usmle.org/test-accommodations/ http://www.usmle.org/test-accommodations/ Are we ok with allowing discrimination like this to continue?

161 points by craigcannon 10y ago

I find that minorities harass women in the street more than other races. And this harassment continues into the office. If we are serious about increasing the number of minorities, there should be some sort of training about what sort of behavior is acceptable and what isn't. Otherwise I don't want to see more minorities in tech.

sctb 10y ago
Please don't create new accounts to violate the guidelines with. We ban them, and then ban the main account if it continues.
- MustardTiger 10y ago
  Even after re-reading the guidelines, I still don't know which one that post is violating. Which guideline are you referring to?
  - dang 10y ago
    I think the casual slur of 'minorities' counts as flamewar material. Perhaps there's a reasonable discussion to be had (though it's likely beyond HN's tolerance) about how race and gender issues complicate each other, including in the tech world, but a comment like this one isn't it.
    - bshimmin 10y ago
      I agree that the comment is not good, but is "minority" really a slur?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - DanBC 10y ago
        The word minority isn't a slur, the statement "minorities harass women in the street more than other races" is.
        bshimmin 10y ago
        Have you seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Hours_of_Walking_in_NYC_as_a_Woman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Hours_of_Walking_in_NYC_as_... ? That statement, slur or no, was certainly one of the main points of contention of that video.
        DanBC 10y ago
        Was it? From the article you posted: > even though the video creator said that she was catcalled by people of all races > Hollaback! responded to the criticism by noting that this video was only the first in a series of many videos that would document different forms of street harassment, and said it regretted any racial bias in the video.[12][13] An analysis of the video documented that most of the scenes shown in the video were taken in neighborhoods with predominantly black and Hispanic populations, raising the question of whether the video was shot mostly in these locations, or whether harassment was more prevalent in these locations than in others. Your summary is dishonestly inaccurate.
        jshevek 10y ago
        > An analysis of the video documented that most of the scenes shown in the video were taken in neighborhoods with predominantly black and Hispanic populations They said they filmed 10 hours of video and then apparently chose the worst instances for their much briefer video showing harassment. It's quite possible that she walked through many different neighborhoods, but those hours of walking simply didn't produce the harassment desired for the video.
    - jshevek 10y ago
      Can you clarify this? Are HN posters allowed to use the term 'minorities'? Are posters allowed to comment on perceived differences of behavior among different demographics?
      - tomhoward 10y ago
        Any words are allowed on HN, as are any comments that are civil, substantive and (sincerely intended to be) intellectually gratifying. With that in mind, the above comment certainly missed the mark.
        jshevek 10y ago
        It seems to me that you and Dang may not agree on Dang's statement. You say that any words are allowed on HN, while Dang said: "I think the casual slur of 'minorities' counts as flamewar material." and I would still like clarification as to whether the word itself - minorities - is considered a slur and inappropriate to HN, or whether it simply considered a 'slur' in this context. If the later, I would like clarification on that. I'm not aware of any quality studies that address this issue, but it may indeed be a matter of fact that in 2016 in the US, black men engage in a disproportionate amount of 'street harassment'. Its still unclear to me whether HN posters are forbidden from discussing this possibility. Edit: I find the suggestion that certain demographics should be targeted for anti-harassment training offensive in the extreme and can see why many people would prefer not to have this kind of content on HN. I just think we should strive for objective rules and apply them evenly.
        tomhoward 10y ago
        I'm quite sure dang was referring to the way the word 'minorities' was used, not the use of the word itself. Remember the comment was "I find that minorities harass women in the street more than other races". Given how broad the terms "minorities" and "other races" are, it's an utterly meaningless statement that serves only to inflame. If you search the comments you'll find plenty of civil uses of the word "minorities", with no objection from the mods. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minorities&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minorities&sort=byPopularity&p...
    - MustardTiger 10y ago
      "Minorities" is not a slur, it is a normal word that means "people who are in the minority". I don't see how that comment is not part of a reasonable discussion. Just because you don't like the fact being mentioned?
      - dang 10y ago
        Obviously the word 'minority' was not the slur.
        MustardTiger 10y ago
        That's not obvious from your post, your statement clearly says it was. It was even quoted. It is obvious from the original post, but it is equally obvious that nothing else was a slur either, the post contained no slurs.

kafkaesq 10y ago

In terms of the interview itself – I hate pop-quiz-style rapid-fire questions. Things like “What is the time complexity of bubble sort? What is hopscotch hashing? What’s the CAP theorem?” And on and on for fifteen minutes and twenty-odd questions. But how else is the interviewer going to prove how smart they are, and signal their dominant status to you?

justicezyx 10y ago
The word is "hate", so it seems to be a personal taste. So the question does not naturally follow.
solipsism 10y ago
Why are you so cynical about this? Don't attribute to malice what is explainable by ignorance.
- tzar 10y ago
  It's muddied somewhat by the sarcasm, but malice isn't necessarily implied nor salient in the OP's point.
- geofft 10y ago
  What room is there for ignorance in figuring out how to conduct a technical interview?
  - solipsism 10y ago
    Are you joking? Interviewing involves many skills. Technical interviewing moreso
    - geofft 10y ago
      Right. So why would we be forgiving of people being ignorant about it? I mean, yes, it's certainly possible to be ignorant about it, lots of people are. But unless you somehow want to hire people who are completely uncorrelated with being good employees, the distinction between unwittingly and wittingly being a terrible interviewer seems a bit thin.

acaciapalm 10y ago

I am glad she mentioned how awful it is to have only one female employee. I was the only woman in an office. One of my co workers made a pretty horrific comment (not about me, but about women in front of me). Someone went to HR and we had sensitivity training...but everyone assumed it was me because I was the only woman. Maybe I SHOULD have gone to HR, but I didn't want to because I feared being the obvious complainant. Which I ended up getting the side-eye for anyway. I realized I would much rather work somewhere with at least 2 other women.

SolarNet 10y ago
Yea that was an idea I got out of this that I think will take to heart, at the very least teams should have a couple of women in them, even if it might make one team all men (the 15% women in tech number is really annoying; the better solution would just be to have half of each team be women).
colmvp 10y ago
I'm not sure how much this has to do with quantity of x as opposed to quality of x. I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism. I've also worked in teams where it's been highly diverse in ethnicity though not gender, and again, never noticed any hints of sexism. Though I have certainly worked in a company with a number of women, including a female co-founder/CEO who was absolutely sexist... against women. I'm not suggesting women are bad CEO's or that diversity is bad, I'm saying that from my experience, it hasn't been about the diversity of the team so much as the type of people in the composition. Also from my POV, I'm not sure how having a random % of women makes more or less sense than a random % of black people or Latino's. Like if a company is predominantly composed of white men, does adding a white female make it more diverse than adding a black man?
- r00fus 10y ago
  > I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism. I don't think your situations are comparable. Women are ~50% of the population and sexual undertones have nothing to do with ethnicity, but everything to do with gender.

rifung 10y ago

> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].” Some recruiters are seriously sketchy. Someone I know joined a company where the recruiter told her that they give all their employees at that level this same salary so there's no room for negotiation unfortunately. After she joined, she asked what other people were making, and found out that even a new grad had higher compensation than she did despite the fact she had several years of experience already. Apparently, they tried to do the same thing to that other employee, but that other employee had another offer and just said that he would take the other offer, to which the recruiter apparently responded, "Oh wait, I'm sorry actually I think we can do something about that. I was looking at the wrong sheet."

dominotw 10y ago
> Someone I know joined a company where the recruiter told her that they give all their employees at that level this same salary so there's no room for negotiation unfortunately. Oh wow. this happened to me recently. I foolishly believed that it was true since I've heard of companies like Reddit that have policies like these.
- jghn 10y ago
  At this point I'm always going to fall into one of two boats: 1) I don't need a job. You'll pay me what I want or no deal. In those cases things like what this recruiter pulled won't work. 2) I need a job. In this case it doesn't really matter to me.
  - praneshp 10y ago
    I have always been in (1) or (2), but can think of (3) I'd love to be at this job (because of company mission, etc) . Maybe it is a subcase of (2)?
    - Fej 10y ago
      I think that would be a subcase of (1). Would be "give me what I want" which would be other reasons than "pay me what I want".

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

chris_7 10y ago

> Founders can use tools like Culture Amp to do anonymous surveys. I wouldn't respond to one of those truthfully - I give four or five stars on everything, and never write any complaints in the free-form text fields. If possible, I just avoid doing them - especially if it's a small company, but at larger companies they tend to be per-team, so it works out the same.

milesokeefe 10y ago
It's a good idea to have that policy and be careful. I submitted a comment in a similar office survey service and despite my submission being anonymous, shortly after submitting it, a superior had a meeting with me to address what the anonymous complaint was about, having determined the comment was from me. In this case I was very glad they figured it out because it ended up being a low risk way of bringing up my concern, but had I not had such a great employer, the result could have been me getting fired or something similar. The comment was only one short sentence and there were 50-100 people employed at the company, so if you want to be honest on platforms like this, I would limit what you say and obfuscate as much as you can. It doesn't take much to identify you.
- josephg 10y ago
  > ... but had I not had such a great employer ... > despite my submission being anonymous, shortly after submitting it, a superior had a meeting with me I'm glad you had a good experience, but a great employer wouldn't have lied to you about the survey being anonymous.
  - dlgeek 10y ago
    There's a difference between "This survey is anonymous"/"Hey, Bob ranked his satisfaction with his manager as 1/5", and "This survey is anonymous"/"Here's a list of complaints from your team"/"Oh, this one is a complaint about how X impacts Y - I know Bob's the only one who's expressed interest in that in the past, I bet it's from him". If my employer told me a survey was anonymous, I would expect anonymity on the Rank/Rate/True-False type questions, but assume that any freeform comments would be identifiable to someone as being from me based on style, content or something else.

exstudent2 10y ago

> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].” This has happened to me multiple times, most frequently when the company was offering a below-market compensation package. This happens to men and women. Recruiters suck, it's not a gender bias in most cases, it's that the role attracts a certain kind of person. A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. The fact is our industry has a lot of money in it and that attracts all kinds of jerks/sharks/shady people. Men deal with all of this on a daily basis as well. I'm just starting to think we don't spend as much time organizing as a group and instead just put our heads down and take it/fight through it in isolation.

DanBC 10y ago
> This happens to men and women > A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. ...and so this is one more example of where feminism helps everyone.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  Not really, because optimizing for the wrong thing means you can make changes that hurt everybody and mistakenly think you've helped. Take Reddit's move of banning salary negotiations: control over how the surplus of the employment relationship is broken up was taken completely out of the hands of the employee. All employees (including women) are hurt by this, and yet a blinkered model that sees nothing but gender disparity would celebrate this as a narrowing of a gender gap. There are smart ways to address disparate-impact gender gaps, but insisting that feminism is the only lens through which to view a problem is not one of them.
  - chris_7 10y ago
    In a salary-negotiation-banned situation, are you also typically prohibited from exchanging salary for vacation, while maintaining the same perceived total compensation?
wutbrodo 10y ago

rubicon33 10y ago

> "As opposed to fox-and-hare looped link lists or implementing a binary tree or something else I’ve done a hundred times in an interview and not once in my actual job." This. Interviewers, stop asking questions that only a fresh college grad should have at the forefront of their mind. One of the best interview's I've had, was actually for a job I didn't get. It was for a game development company, and they actually posed problems and questions one might face in their day to day work. For example, writing an efficient collision detection algorithm.

wutbrodo 10y ago
> This. Interviewers, stop asking questions that only a fresh college grad should have at the forefront of their mind. These aren't questions "only a college grad should know" they're often questions that are baseline knowledge for understanding programming vs just having a few rote cargo cult "skills". I have been on both sides of the interview process at Google, and I remember when I was prepping to conduct my first interview, one of my teammates gave me some advice. He suggested I open with something along the lines of "merge two sorted lists". Someone who couldn't do this with a minimum of effort barely fits the definition of "knowing how to program" (let alone being a good engineer). And yet, a non trivial chunk of the candidates he had met with didn't clear this bar! Starting with an assumption that your candidate can handle complex questions when they can't even program can just muddle the issue, and there's very little advantage to skipping over the basic test. Bear in mind that this was at Google, and these were candidates who had already made it past the first line filter.
- _RPM 10y ago
  Consider the fact that coding under pressure is hard and it probably doesn't mean that the candidate is incapable of merging two sorted lists. Right now I can think of a way to do it: var ar = []; ar1.map(function() { ar.push(arguments[0]); } ar2.map(function() { ar.push(arguments[0]); } However, under pressure it's so much different than responding to a comment. This is for sure a great question to ask.
  - 10y ago

jkot 10y ago

In my experience distributed company is best if you want diverse team from start. I worked at company where 70% of engineers were women.

FT_intern 10y ago
The percent of female CS graduates is ~20-30%. Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate % considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  It's just as sexist but it's not PC to stand up for the rights of men or white people.
- mrkurt 10y ago
  I don't think companies are considered sexist based on the ratio of men/women. They're considered sexist when they _act_ sexist and don't work very hard to cultivate a good environment.
  - Crito 10y ago
    > considered By whom?
  - hueving 10y ago
    It is. Companies like Google are frequently hounded to find out 'what they are doing about their gender crisis' even though their numbers reflect graduation ratios.
    - mrkurt 10y ago
      I think there are a lot of groups that have an obligation to change things, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad either. Google is big enough to actually affect the up stream numbers, I'm glad they're working at it.

jomamaxx 10y ago

"It’s important to me that recruiters and interviewers are respectful. Nothing is worse than a condescending interviewer." What does this have to do with 'female'? This is the norm in high tech for everyone - sadly. Am I under the impression that this girl thinks that she's being singled out as a girl on this? Because I got it most of the time during my career. Not saying it's right, but I don't think it's a gender issue.

slavik81 10y ago
My understanding is that this article series is not about experiences that are uniquely female. Rather, it's just generally about the experiences of female engineers. Many experiences are likely to be the same as for a male engineer, but not all. I really like this approach, as I think it makes it easier to understand their perspective.
- cbcowans 10y ago
  Yes that's exactly it. Glad you like the approach.
st3v3r 10y ago
Because interviewers are more likely to be condescending to someone they don't respect, and many of them don't respect women. Yes, this stuff happens to many people, not just women. But it happens to them on an alarmingly regular basis.
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  That's the extreme case, but there is also the less malicious one where because of stereotypes and average distributions at a particular company, people just assume women they are speaking to to be less technical than they are and try to 'helpfully' explain things at an unnecessarily basic level. Say, a system's engineer explaining their work to a female college as if she were a front end developer by default, where they would ask a male college what their experience was before making that assumption. This is an easy mistake to make if you are a kernel hacker in an organization that has, say 20% female developers overall, but where only 2% of kernel hackers are women. Easy to make, not malicious, but not much less annoying because of it, specially if you are the 10th person to assume that. From your point of view, it is a very efficient cache prediction strategy, since you'll get it right 90% of the time[1], but from theirs, it means half their queries end up miss-predicted... [1] Yes, I am assuming 50% of all developers are kernel hackers, you can switch to something more realistic like product vs infra, front vs backend, etc. Also, the point is not about "lower-level systems programming being real-er programming!", but about making assumptions based partly on gender.

sergiotapia 10y ago

She mentions to make an effort towards diversity at the end. As a latino, diversity for diversity sake never made sense to me. What am I a lego piece or something? Meritocracy.

romanovcode 10y ago
Same here, it's not like you're re-populating the planet where diversity is important.
carapace 10y ago
Even if you're not into diversity for it's own sake, there's still the situation where someone who merits it less gets a job over someone who merits it more, due to their ethnicity.
girvo 10y ago
Diversity of experiences and opinions are good, in my opinion, because they allow problems to be approached in ways that I wouldn't otherwise have considered, if it was a singular mono-culture.
- atom-morgan 10y ago
  But diversity in tech usually revolves around skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.
  - aplusbi 10y ago
    Which is a very, very good proxy for diversity of experience and opinion.
    - brighteyes 10y ago
      It might be, but political affiliation, religion, and age would be equally good proxies. But these aspects rarely if at all get addressed.
    - 10y ago

toomanybeersies 10y ago

> There’s another side to the equation too, which is being a female interviewer meeting with male candidates... it will subtly or overtly turn into a situation where the candidate is speaking and addressing questions or answers to my coworker. This happens even when I am leading the interview... I wonder if this goes both ways. If a male was leading the interview, and they were interviewing a female, would the interviewee tend to talk to the female interviewer?

jrnichols 10y ago
> would the interviewee tend to talk to the female interviewer? In my experience, yes, this definitely happens.

stephenboyd 10y ago

A former classmate of mine posted on her blog yesterday about some of her tech interview experiences. She didn't generalize about inclusive culture, but her perspective is enlightening. http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/10/5/a-few-stories-of-tech-interviews http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/10/5/a-few-stories-of...

thedufer 10y ago
Perfect correlation between good interviews and getting an offer does not inspire confidence in how accurate the descriptions are. Times like these you want to hear the other side of the story.
- stephenboyd 10y ago
  If an excellent candidate doesn't get an offer, it's probable that something went wrong in the interview process. And if there are only three examples of rejections, there's not enough data to talk about unexpected correlations.
  - thedufer 10y ago
    > If an excellent candidate doesn't get an offer, it's probable that something went wrong in the interview process Google sees about half of their employees come from at least a second interview attempt, implying that qualified people fail at least 1/2 the time. Maybe you're claiming that their process is terrible? Or that most companies are significantly better at hiring than them? As the only data point I can find, though, it seems pretty damning. > And if there are only three examples of rejections It's unclear to me why only rejections count. 7 for 7 is a lot more concerning than 3 for 3. FTR, out of the 6 interview processes I've gone through I can think of 2 that don't correlate in this way (one in each direction). So I think I have some basis for suspicion.
random314 10y ago
Looks like she really dislikes being asked to code in an interview. She just wants to have a friendly conversation. She will be a great fit for consulting firms that bill by the hour.

_RPM 10y ago

What's the hidden message behind being late to an interview?

AlexCoventry 10y ago
The article implies it suggests that the late employees are inconsiderate or can't "execute."

balls187 10y ago

Implement bubble sort? That's a terrible question.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Great work doing this and good luck. Have a couple of ignorant questions: 1). Is it correct that there is no consensus on say, the top three reasons that females are under represented in computer science? It's frustrating that so many lay people voice just opinions and anecdotes. Is the real research starting to agree on what are the most important factors yet? 2) Some people say genetics is one reason females are underrepresented. For example they say, maybe on average females simply tend to be less interested in the subject. Is there any data that actually supports, or excludes this notion?

hesarenu 10y ago
Might be representative of the west. Good number of females are seen in Indian companies. But they usually drop off after getting married.
cauterized 10y ago
For point 2, that's what they said about medicine, law, pretty much any other male-dominated field you can name. Even if there's a difference in interest among adults, why should that difference in interest be due to genetic factors rather than cultural differences in how we raise boys vs girls and how teens are peer pressured? Edited to add: by the way, back in the 50s and 60s, computer programming was female-dominated.
- tomp 10y ago
  That's actually not true. There is a graph that's often used to support this point [1]. But using a better graph, we can see that CS is in line with engineering (CS is definitely more "engineering" than it is "science") [2]. [1] https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide-4b0beb106fe1b4cfabd9799accb65e8ef8097473.jpg?s=1400 https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide... [2] https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg
notgood 10y ago
Nope. There is no consensus. Sociology, psychology and biology are all intertwined as part of the reason so conclusions are heavily based on interpretations (therefore open to bias). I think the closest ones to the truth are those who explore the early years and how they relate to the careers they will choose. For example this study[0] on neonatal babies (meaning not yet influenced by culture/society) concluded that males are more interested by mechanics and females ate more interested in faces; reinforcing the idea that females are more social oriented and males more exploration oriented. By the way, one of the reasons there is no consensus is the controversy that generates reaching any conclusion that is not "it's just that society is sexist" [0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300000321 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300...

superpope99 10y ago

It tickles me that they have an Ada and a Grace representing women.

detaro 10y ago
The names are pseudonyms

happyslobro 10y ago

A while ago, I worked with an all male team of about 20 programmers. The odd thing was, though, that there were a lot of women writing code, but not officially as production programmers. They were in high level support positions, mainly working on infrastructure and data, and helping my team work within in their system. This role is now commonly referred to as dev-ops or data analyst, elsewhere, and pays very well. But, because their job title was "L2 support", they were paid less and missed out on a bunch of perks. I had a friend in "support" who had build a lot of a data normalization system that I often worked with, and we talked about the phenomenon a couple times over lunch. Basically, she was a little offended about the lower pay and the "support" title, but would rather keep her work / life balance and relatively powerful position within the infrastructure stack, than join the production team for a raise. In hindsight, someone should have fought for the whole L2 support department to be better paid; there was certainly money for that (we were in a wildly profitable niche), and the support engineers had the high ground. But we were both young technical types, and didn't have the business / legal skills or the confidence to confront management. I'm not sure how things have played out there in the years since I left, but if they wanted to, that entire L2 support team could take off and form a devops / analytics consulting firm, and probably multiply their incomes by some small integers. Then they could hire from the product team too, if they needed web/UI ;)

bandrami 10y ago

This is why I love working at companies with open books. All of our salaries are posted on our intranet, along with every other expense the company has. It only works when the company is entirely self-funded, though, so it takes a little hunting to find them. (We also have 100% open meetings except for HR issues, which I've come to love too -- it's cool to be able to see what sales or R&D are up to).

ryanmarsh 10y ago

This is why I taught my daughters the four magic words when it comes to getting paid: FUCK YOU PAY ME It's all about an aggressive attitude towards compensation. It's why I make so much and others whom I believe deserve more than me do not. They just aren't aggressive enough. You have to be aggressive by default when it comes to compensation. It's not about the words per se, but the attitude.

geebee 10y ago

Part of the problem here is that I think we, in tech, have really forgotten how stressful it is to be given a technical exam at a whiteboard, especially with an undercurrent of finding charlatans who "can't even do basic programming!" Many people from other professions and graduate programs describe their oral exams as among the most stressful academic experiences they've been through, because it's unusually embarrassing to fail publicly and people are afraid of "freezing". And that's when there's a pretty clear and well publicized study route, with an ostensibly consistently graded exam, with professors and/or industry practitioners who are experts in their field, with feedback and mechanisms to ensure fairness and integrity. We get all the stress, but none of the protections, in tech. And we never really get to stop doing it. I've been through the washing machine enough times that I am pretty resistant to it, though it does still get to me as well. Early career, I did feel pretty humiliated after some of these experiences. Sometimes, I think we lose sight of this. When I described what it was like to "interview" at google and other places, people outside tech kind of shuddered. Their interviews are more like conversations - yes, you need to know what you're talking about, but you don't stand in front of a committee, at a whiteboard, getting treated like a grad student going through quals (if only!) every single time you interview at a new company! I've heard some questions about whether this is just an inevitable part of being a programmer. If it is, fine, but then please, let's stop scratching our heads about why there's a supposed "shortage" of programmers. If an extremely unpleasant quasi-hazing is a necessary part of applying for a developer job (every single time), then let's not be surprised when people decide they don't want to work in this field anymore, don't want to enter it in the first place, are reluctant to change jobs, or, alternatively, prefer careers in actuarial work, law, medicine, nursing, or other fields where they get to take their exams under conditions that are far more respectful of the candidate and result in a lasting, meaningful credential, respected in their field, so they don't have to do it over and over.

scsilver 10y ago
Further more, we have legal protections for those with disabilities when taking these certifications that is not accounted for in the tech sector. http://www.americanbar.org/groups/disabilityrights/resources/biad.html http://www.americanbar.org/groups/disabilityrights/resources... http://ncees.org/exams/special-accommodations/ada-exam-accommodations/ http://ncees.org/exams/special-accommodations/ada-exam-accom... http://www.usmle.org/test-accommodations/ http://www.usmle.org/test-accommodations/ Are we ok with allowing discrimination like this to continue?