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You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

• soham 10y ago
  [Disclaimer: I run http://Interviewkickstart.com http://Interviewkickstart.com] Thanks Aline. Excellent article, as always. Not that any interview process is perfect, but another reason why the current process is not going away, is sheer convenience, especially for the fast growing core tech companies that don't have a pipeline problem. When you have hundreds of people applying for any open role, and you're under pressure to deliver products quarter after quarter, your incentive is to stick to a process that gives reasonable results, fast enough. e.g. Google has estimated 40K engineers. With a 10 year average time on job (it's probably less), G is hiring 40K engineers every 10 years just to sustain itself. That's a massive operation and the incentive of any company at that scale, is to design a multi-layer, fast process. They are looking for 40K engineers that pass that process, not necessarily 40k best engineers from their pipeline. Considering diversity with that little attention span is possible, but very hard to do. And like you said, technology is possibly the only way diversity hiring can be encouraged/enforced.
  • leeny 10y ago
    Yup. When you have a revolving door of people who want to work for you (often, despite your interview process), you're probably gonna be fine no matter what. That said, folks at Google are putting a ton of effort and resources into diversity initiatives. But not at the expense of revamping the current process.
    • Kephael 10y ago
      I can't think of a single reputable company that I would be interested in working at in a SDE role where they do not conduct data structure and algorithm intensive interviews. If you want to work at a brand name company as a developer today, you must be able to solve these interview questions.
      • yarou 10y ago
        I tend to agree with this sentiment. As my colleague aptly put, algorithms/data structure questions aren't really about whether a potential candidate can perform the job. It's more about whether or not they are "one of us". I mean, if you couldn't be bothered to brush up on CS fundamentals, how can I trust you with the responsibilities that the job entails? That looks like a red flag to me. FWIW, when I interview people, I ask actual problems I've run into, i.e. design and implement a sane concurrency system that's easy to reason about on an embedded platform with limited resources.
      • jaimebuelta 10y ago
        My main problem with this is the fact that, at certain point, your previous experience gets somehow irrelevant. Have you been able to solve difficult technical problem in the last 5 years, which you can explain in detail? It doesn't matter unless you can code me from scratch a binary tree. Do you have domain experience about something the company work? Cool story, but tell me the proper API call to do this obscure operation. I understand what's the point of that, I made technical interviews myself and I know is the game to play, but at some point it feel a little weird that you cannot leverage your previous experience and go talk the interesting, actually relevant parts, not the big O of quick sort algorithm... After playing the game N times (and I don't think I'm particularly bad at it), it gets a little tiresome, I have to say...
  • pzh 10y ago
    Actually, I remember reading that Google and Amazon engineers have an average time on the job of about 1 year. It seems most people just want to work there so they can put it on their resume, or maybe once they pass the interview process, they are confronted with the reality that not all jobs there are so glamorous--e.g. people probably imagine they'd be working side by side with Jeff Dean and his likes, but then they actually end up maintaining some internal system that keeps track of the stock in the Google cafeterias. I wonder if after ten years or so, a short stint at Google or one of the other big five would become a requirement to be taken seriously in the field...
    • zigzigzag 10y ago
      Without a doubt that stat is because these companies have grown so fast. It's not that people leave after a year, it's that they have added tons of engineers in the last year (and have done so repeatedly for the last few years). I worked at Google. Turnover was really low. 10 year average stay doesn't sound unreasonable for me if you select only the employees that have left.
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • pzh 10y ago
        Maybe I misunderstand the metric, but isn't turnout calculated as the average tenure of people who leave? If the companies just add more engineers, this shouldn't affect the metric (unless you also count the tenure of people who are actually still working there, but that doesn't sound like a good way to estimate churn rate...) If that's the case, it seems there is quite a bit of confusion about this: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-07-29/why-are-google-employees-so-disloyal- https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-07-29/why-are-g...
        • zigzigzag 10y ago
          You didn't quote turnover figures, you quoted average time on the job.
• treehau5 10y ago
  I agree that tech interviews are terrible, and you cannot do any sort of self-reflection on them (especially if they are these q/a and or puzzle types where they don't give you answers or feedback of what you are looking for, despite being reasonably confident you answered correctly -- even after having requested the feedback -- I had this experience at GitLab) > We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game I just don't understand this reasoning. Can someone explain differently? I also agree with a later point -- no firm should have a "VP of Diversity and Inclusivity" but for different reasons.
  • burkaman 10y ago
    I think the next couple sentences explain it well: > It takes a lot of interviews to get used to the process and the format and to understand that the stuff you do in technical interviews isn’t actually the stuff you do at work every day. And it takes people in your social circle all going through the same experience, screwing up interviews here and there, and getting back on the horse to realize that poor performance in one interview isn’t predictive of whether you’ll be a good engineer. If you don't have friends in the industry and you don't have the time and money to go interview at 10 different places, 1 or 2 failed algorithms interviews can be very discouraging and might convince you that you're not cut out for this industry. In fact the "Poor performances hit marginalized groups the hardest" section has actual data showing that women are much more likely to stop trying after 1 or 2 failed interviews.
    • ThrustVectoring 10y ago
      I think this was one of the biggest take-aways I got from attending a coding bootcamp, honestly. Basically everybody failed their first on-site interview, even the strongest candidates from the cohort who went on to get the best overall results.
      • deleted 10y ago
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• Animats 10y ago
  The big result there is this: "Poor performances in technical interviewing happen to most people, even people who are generally very strong. However, when we looked at our data, we discovered that after a poor performance, women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men." On the hiring side, "For the specific case of an online job posting, on average, 1,000 individuals will see a job post, 200 will begin the application process, 100 will complete the application, 75 of those 100 resumes will be screened out by either the ATS or a recruiter, 25 resumes will be seen by the hiring manager, 4 to 6 will be invited for an interview, 1 to 3 of them will be invited back for final interview, 1 will be offered that job and 80 percent of those receiving an offer will accept it (Talent Function Group LLC)." This implies that 80% of interviews lead to rejection. Given that level of rejection, the key here is to get women to know the odds and keep trying.
  • trhway 10y ago
    logically unexplainable multiple rejections just after very short interactions by seemingly picky capricious agents on the other side of the interactions - isn't it that the men have biologically wired in them as a normal thing to expect, doesn't matter be it dating or sales or tech interview...
    • zigzigzag 10y ago
      lol, thanks, I needed a laugh. Cynical but there's probably something to it.
    • golergka 10y ago
      Not sure about biology, but it's certainly ingrained culturally. As a man, I'm constantly trained by the society to overcome rejection, and a typical dating pattern of men approaching women is a major part of this. However, I wouldn't use words like "patriarchy" here because I honestly think that this assymetry hurts both genders equally, just in different ways.
      • FT_intern 10y ago
        Men have the disadvantage (or advantage) of facing rejection much more often than women. Whether men overcome the rejection and become more capable is debatable, although it's clear men are more accustomed to being rejected.
• AvenueIngres 10y ago
  Honestly, the more I read about all those "diversity initiatives", "outreach campaigns" and "pushes to increase H1B" caps - the more I wonder about the intent and motivation of the people pulling the strings and funding the groups fighting so hard to further those causes. My comment is only tangentially related to hiring practices. Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously starts to look like an organized campaign to 1/ increase the supply of engineers in the valley 2/ increase competition for access to a limited supply of jobs 3/ maintain engineers as a inexpensive, replaceable and unorganized workforce (in the face of increasing demand). To address the diversity numbers of Facebook, I wonder what are they exactly suggesting when they mean that it is not "diverse"? At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". To clear that out and maybe find out that I am mistaken, I want to know with what kind of demographic breakdown would proponents of diversity be pleased. Should it follow the US racial distribution? Or have equal proportions of people from each race? Finally, I think that a breakdown according to class would be much more interesting than this document. Since race is only skin deep, I do believe that having people from all walks of life would be a better optima than having people of different colors (that are all upper middle class).
  • forgottenpass 10y ago
    Maybe age has turned me into a cynic Nah man. Even a half-honest business person will tell you the business incentive for making and funding diversity goals is about expanding the hiring pool. The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. Maybe the businesses are true believers in diversity, or maybe they're cold, calculating, and just hiring the true believers to diversify their business. It's like when Google lobbies the government and their goals happen to overlap with ends an everyday engineer clued into the topic also likes. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. But they'll make the strong principled argument for it.
    • mrkurt 10y ago
      The individuals probably are acting on a moral belief, but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart.
• ams6110 10y ago
  I've been in software tech for nearly 30 years. Never had a "technical" interview, puzzle solving, or anything like that. I would not take a job that screened candidates that way. If references and credentials and track record aren't enough, I would look elsewhere.
  • treve 10y ago
    Good for you that the market is so good, you can be insulted and walk away from an interview and still find a different job that doesn't do an extremely standard thing: basic technical screening. Your credentials might speak for themselves. After all, you've been working for 30 years. 80% of the people I've hired have between 0 and 5 years work experience and without a technical screening I might as well just give them the job based on dice roll. Usually I don't check credentials, and only use a resume to make a selection but don't use it _at all_ to determine if you're a good candidate after you've come in for an interview.
    • white-flame 10y ago
      I think most experienced people would agree that a technical interview could be appropriate for someone with 0-5 years of work experience. For somebody with 10+ years of experience, who you can find that talks the talk during a real interview, CS101-level quizzes are insulting and inappropriate.
      • pklausler 10y ago
        IME it's not about asking easy questions, it's about asking questions about "programming in the small" that are relevant to day-to-day work. I conduct lots of technical interviews and I've found that it's just as important to ask the 10+ year veterans about the fundamentals as it is to ask the new grads. It's just way too easy to talk about programming while actually being incompetent at it. Only by having a candidate write real code can an interviewer detect the difference.
      • wpietri 10y ago
        I have worked with people who have 10+ years of experience and can talk the talk, but are still pretty bad at the day-to-day work of writing software. I also have worked with some great developers who aren't so good at interview-style conversations. I agree CS quizzes are a bad interview technique, which is why I favor pair programming. But I've never had a good candidate feel insulted by asking to sit down and code together for a while. Indeed, the #1 thing good programmers have in common is they like programming.
• Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...
• treve 10y ago
  I'm surprised that "people of color" is the preferred term for racial diversity.
  • jakebasile 10y ago
    I believe it is to emphasize that they are people first, not "colored" people. I'm not big into political newspeak but that one makes sense to me.
    • tzs 10y ago
      From what I've read, it's more that "colored people" mostly only referred to black people in the United States, whereas "people of color" refers to all non-whites (except asians may or may not be included in "people of color" depending on whatever is more convenient at the time). "People of color" has always sounded bad to me. It follows the <noun> <preposition> <noun> pattern, with "people" and "color" being both nouns. It sounds to me as if it emphasizes the group, not the individual. To emphasize the person, rather than the group, I think <adjective> <noun> is better.
  • douche 10y ago
    It just goes around in a circle, given long enough.
  • aries1980 10y ago
    It gives me a hard time to understand why sociologists think white people are homogeneous. In certain professions, if you don't wear black oxford lace-ups, you are out, even if your skin is #ffffff.
• forgottenpass 10y ago
  Technical interviews are moving in the direction of more concreteness Herein lies the scam. (Disclaimer: It's not on purpose, they're lying to themselves too) Just because you have a process to produce a "concrete" result, that doesn't mean it doesn't stand on a house of cards. I'd have to sit and have a think to make a clearer explanation than by analogy, so here's an analogy. This reminds me of the way people with an insufficient anti-authoritarian streak are more willing to question a person's on the spot decision than a decision from systematic, bureaucracy or law. Just because more time and process has gone into establishing them, doesn't necessitate that the decisions are any better founded than what some rando pulls out of their ass. Because, at the end of the day, taking the technical portion of the interview itself too seriously is the real fraud. There is exactly one way to tell how well someone will be able to contribute to our team, with our technologies, in our environment after a few weeks of getting up to speed. And that's to hire them. The technical portion of the interview isn't useful beyond a low-bar rule-out criteria. After that, the technical portion turns back towards the softer skills of how the interviewee handles hitting a wall at problem solving in a field where nobody knows everything.
• balls187 10y ago
  Indians of Asian descent are a minority in the US, but well represented in Software Engineering. Further, there are plenty more Indian, Chinese, and Russian female engineers, than there are American (of european, aka White) female engineers. I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.
  • Manishearth 10y ago
    This addresses a straw man; nobody is saying that there is systemic bias against _all_ minorities, just some. This in particular is the concept of a "model minority". Culture difference cannot explain why women are not well represented in tech. Culture difference can be a part of systemic bias, anyway. Let's say you have some programming job. The interviews focus on questions about frobbing linked lists (which is often the case). Now, it turns out that people from demographic A are more likely to focus on these questions when practicing for interviews, whereas demographic B focuses on honing the skill set they need for the actual job (algorithmy linked list stuff may not be necessary at all!). You'd say that it's not possible for /culture/ to change how you study. There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills. This stems from the general culture of finding and using a formulaic method of succeeding at academics. I don't like this culture (it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic), and always have spoken out against it, but it's there. But, you say, that's a different country, what about a minority demographic within the same country? Firstly, minorities more often than not are segregated into their own communities (socially, if not physically) due to various voluntary and involuntary reasons, and the effect can be the same as being in a different country (albeit milder). Now realize that an interviewer will probably design questions around the kind that they are used to and that they (and their peers) would do well with. This is an unconscious bias -- interview questions are more often than not tests of how similar you are to the (often non-diverse) peer group of the interviewer, and not actually a test of how good you are as a candidate. This is an association fallacy, "all people like my peer group are good programmers, hence all good programmers are like my peer group". Of course, interviewing is often about avoiding bad programmers much more than it is about hiring good ones -- generally folks are okay with accidentally not hiring a good programmer, but want to avoid hiring a bad one at all costs. Thus tweaking your interview process to target a subset of the set of all good programmers isn't that bad, is it? Except that this targeting carries an unconscious bias inside it, and unfairly ends up disproportionately excluding minorities. If you're going to use a process prone to false negatives on purpose, be damn sure that the likelihood of someone being a false negative is in no way correlated with the demographic they are from. You may not have designed the process with this correlation in mind (hence, "unconscious bias"), but this bias is still there. ----- And it doesn't have to be culture differences. You have a lot of other behavioral differences due to economic status or demographic which are unconsciously excluded in interviews. E.g. women are less likely to apply for jobs where they do not have all the listed qualifications, but men are very likely to apply, and get hired, because not all the qualifications were necessary anyway. The fix here is to be clear on what you absolutely need in a candidate, and what would be "nice to have". And it doesn't have to be behavioral differences either. Sometimes it has to do with defining your inputs. Many companies focus on hiring from a set of people which itself is biased. It can be by hiring only from certain colleges (and then inexplicably whining about the "pipeline" -- you chose the pipeline!). It can be from having unconscious or conscious discrimination against autodidacts. Or code bootcamp folks. If you restrict your inputs to an already biased source, you will get biased results. There are tons and tons of articles and papers out there about this. These aren't unknown effects. They're well established. None of this is on purpose, of course (at least, I hope it isn't!). But it's still a bias, even if it's unconscious. And the onus is on the creators of the bias to fix it. There are a million reasons out there why various demographics aren't well-represented in tech. It's just lazy to blame it on the demographics and say "it's cultural differences" without realizing the mistakes made by tech cos in making culture a factor in the first place.
• briholt 10y ago
  You're missing the point. The point isn't what's actually happening in the world, whether racism actually exists, or what actual solutions there might be. The point is to scream "racism" as loudly as possible so you can signal your virtue to your peers and get clicks. After all, if you don't cry "racism" every 5 minutes, how will all of your friends know you're opposed to racism?
  • sctb 10y ago
    We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859390 and marked it off-topic.
  • acedinlowball 10y ago
    THIS kind of sarcasm is why I love HN. Upvote!
  • DanBC 10y ago
    > so you can signal your virtue to your peers and get clicks. The irony.
• DocSavage 10y ago
  The diversity figures could be worse. They could have included a breakdown based on age and compared Facebook vs national norms and firms doing US government/military software contracts. Age is not required for the EEO-1 filings: "EEO-1 reports filed by employers with more than 100 employees provide data based on race, color, sex and national origin,but do not report data on age or disability. We are aware that both groups are underrepresented in the tech workforce, suggesting the need for research to understand the causes and potential solutions." https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/reports/hightech/upload/diversity-in-high-tech-report.pdf https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/reports/hightech/upload...
• 234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
  Agreed, the American system from early age to adulthood puts women and minorities on a path to laziness. As an example, they get better grades for less effort and free money to pursue education. They expect the business world to be the same way, and when they realize just how much work goes into becoming a successful software engineer, they give up and do something easier for less pay. I would to if I could! In Russia, life is tougher, winters colder, and people are shown failures much more than their American counterparts. What we need is more failure and strong character rather than handouts and diversity managers.
  • sctb 10y ago
    We don't need such baseless, inflammatory comments like this on Hacker News. The bar for civility and substantiveness is higher on controversial topics, not lower. We've detached this flagged comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859390.
    • crimsonalucard 10y ago
      I don't think this was inflammatory or uncivil. Definitely highly controversial, definitely baseless (like every other comment on HN) but not inflammatory or uncivil. I would have voted it down because I disagree, but I don't think censorship is justified.
    • piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
      What exactly in his post is untrue?
• exstudent2 10y ago
  There's nothing to "fix" here. If there were good candidates being passed up, they would certainly congregate elsewhere and create success. If that's not happening, then it's a supply issue. And really it's no issue at all since people have free will and certain demographics just aren't choosing to be engineers. There's nothing wrong with that, we should stop trying to force them into our line of work.
  • InclinedPlane 10y ago
    > "If there were good candidates being passed up, they would certainly congregate elsewhere and create success." BS, that's a dodge. I've seen plenty of people (regardless of their background, ethnicity, or gender) who've been screwed by the system and have spent way too long in crappy jobs where they were unable to make much of a difference. Some people get lucky and early on they find jobs where their talent can shine through and they get on a train that just keeps going up. Other folks may have things line up for them that way only much later in their career, yet others maybe not at all. And if the less lucky decide to switch careers instead of continue struggling and getting frustrated with their ambitions being constantly thwarted then you may never know the potential that was lost from that change of careers. I've also known many extremely talented developers who happened to stumble into the career by accident, and if even some small thing had been different along the way they would have been doing something else.
    • exstudent2 10y ago
      That's not been my experience at all. I've generally seen good people get ahead. Sure everyone has personal setbacks but en mass it's definitely not an issue.
      • acdha 10y ago
        Do you see anything incongruous in the way you are comfortable casually rejecting InclinedPlane's experience but using your personal experience to conclude that it's not a widespread problem?
• Houshalter 10y ago
  Interviews in general have a lot of problems: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_outperform_expert/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_out... >Unstructured interviews reliably degrade the decisions of gatekeepers (e.g. hiring and admissions officers, parole boards, etc.). Gatekeepers (and SPRs) make better decisions on the basis of dossiers alone than on the basis of dossiers and unstructured interviews. (Bloom and Brundage 1947, DeVaul et. al. 1957, Oskamp 1965, Milstein et. al. 1981; Hunter & Hunter 1984; Wiesner & Cronshaw 1988). If you're hiring, you're probably better off not doing interviews. The "make candidate solve puzzles" technical interview sounds like a very poorly designed IQ test. Just replacing it with more objective standardized IQ tests would help a lot.
  • pjscott 10y ago
    The link you cited is talking specifically about "unstructured interviews", the sort where you're judged based on handshake firmness and questions like "What is your greatest weakness?" It shouldn't be too surprising that these are poor predictors of job performance. Programming technical interviews are not supposed to be like that. They're supposed to be some mixture of a relevant-ish skills test and a plausibly-deniable IQ test. (One constraint here is that anything which is overtly an IQ test will make the company's lawyers get twitchy and start nervously trying to remember the details of the Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co.)
• balls187 10y ago
  > We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… Turns out, people who are bad at technical interviews, are underrepresented at companies who use technical interviews to hire employees.
  • Manishearth 10y ago
    This is their point exactly. "Being good at technical interviews" is not the same thing as "being a good programmer". You can be bad at interviews but good at programming. You can be good at interviews but bad at programming. Turns out that there's a correlation between the former set and certain demographics, because of unconscious biases in the interview process.
    • flukus 10y ago
      I'd like to know their definition of technical interview because it seems to cover everything from fizzbuzz to arcane problems. I very much doubt there are good programmers that can't solve fizzbuzz.
    • user5994461 10y ago
      Doesn't have to be the same thing, it just has to be correlated enough.
      • Manishearth 10y ago
        Of course it doesn't. I talk about this in my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12859833), many companies are okay with false negatives. And false negatives are okay. Sad, but okay. However, if your metric for hiring is also correlated with favoring a particular demographic, you shouldn't be using it. False negatives are not okay when you disproportionately target one group.
• yuhong 10y ago
  This is one of the reasons why I dislike anti-discrimination laws. For example, one of the methods used to enforce them (particularly in things like hiring) is statistics, most of which assumes employees are interchangeable commodities. They were designed back in the 1960s for things like manual labor jobs. I am willing to suggest a compromise to limit them to these kinds of jobs.
• aplomb 10y ago
  It's more than fixing the technical interview process. Bottom line is western culture does not raise daughters to succeed in tech. From my own experiences 80% of the chemists I've worked with (including leadership) are female - so it's not a total failure in STEM education.
  • InclinedPlane 10y ago
    The culture around software development is unfortunately very misogynistic and/or off-putting and exclusionary toward women, so they find themselves pushed away from the dev education/career track from an early age and onward. It wasn't always this way, it used to be that women made up a larger percentage of software engineers, but the culture changed over time. Not that dudes in tech are willing to accept this, for them everything about the culture is part of its charm, and the industry is a perfect meritocracy.
• vilhelm_s 10y ago
  They have a big figure labelled "People Can't Gauge Their Own Interview Perfomance", which shows that when the interviewer and interviee rated the perfomance on a 1-4 scale, 46% of candidates guessed their exact score, and another 45% were off by one. That seems pretty good to me. Can you really expect any more agreement than that?
  • etherealmachine 10y ago
    1 and 4 are probably reserved for people who lied on their resume and the rare stellar candidate, so either 2 or 3 would be a very safe guess.
• cagataygurturk 10y ago
  Why diversity is needed to be fixed in the first place? Pizza business is dominated by italians and kebap by turkish, and nobody tries to fix diversity issues in those industries. Somehow every industry finds its own best people and the balance, I don't understand the need of fixing it. Nursery is dominated by women and men are underpresented there, should we also fix it?
  • dracht 10y ago
    Tech is hip, trendy and a desirable sector now - unlike, say, logging or mining. Some people feel like they are not only owed a seat at the table, but that there was a grand conspiracy in keeping them out of a field that not long ago only a certain group of people was interested in.
• dreta 10y ago
  "We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game.” I understand that people here hate technical interviews, but are we going to skip over the fact that the whole premise of this article is that the technical interview is awful for everybody, but minorities are more affected, because their poor little brains can’t figure that out? It’s ridiculous that you’d ever even propose that some "VP of Diversity and Inclusion” has anything to do with hiring of engineers. Why is this garbage being given any thought on HN is baffling to me.
  • 234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
    Someone gets it. Funny how people who are so "moral", actually end up being incredibly immoral and biased. Here's a question: if there's such a demand for solutions that solve a problem that the "majority" can't see, why don't women and minorities just start their own companies to solve those problems and make piles of $$$? Reality check: building a good team is a struggle for every race, culture, gender, and individual in every industry on the planet. I get it though, it's a lot easier to mooch off of actual engineers who build solutions and then act like they had some significant impact as the "Director of Diversity". Keep riding those coat-tails, maybe one day you will invent something on your own that isn't pseudo-scientific bullshit and actually improves people's lives. Go on, I DARE you to run your own startup and actually try to hire good help. You'll quickly find you have no time for such nonsense and only care about getting $*!@& done.
    • deleted 10y ago
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• tuxidomasx 10y ago
  I think the conversation about diversity in tech often overlooks a key metric, which is the percentage of tech companies that are founded by and/or employ a majority of minorities. For example, if its accurate to say that over 88% of US tech companies are founded by white people and employ mostly white people, then a diversity issue exists in the number of tech companies founded by black people and employing mostly black people. As a black american, it's interesting that the approach to tech diversity so often revolves around the concept of hiring minorities to help fulfil the goals of existing (mostly white) companies. An approach that feels more altruistic to me would be to empower minorities to build their own tech companies to solve their own types of problems, and hire people who are a good 'culture fit.' Instead of diversifying employees, diversify the companies and let them naturally attract diverse employees.
  • T2_t2 10y ago
    Yeh, I'm not sure that's a great idea. Companies fail a LOT - startups especially. We look at the successes and think "this is the way to do it", but I wonder if the failures would be felt most starkly by the poor. If Zuckerberg failed at FaceBook, he was still Ivy league educated from a middle class family. That safety net really helps take that risk. I'm not saying stop people doing it, but I'm not sure encouraging more high risk taking amongst the most vulnerable is wise. But I agree with your central idea - diversity of options, beacuse diversity, to me, is not forcing every environment to be as diverse as possible, it is about a diversity in the cultural landscape. As a reductio ad absurdum analogy, diversity isn't forcing mosques to server beer and bacon and forcing pubs to have alcohol and pig free sections, it is having a world where there are both Mosques and pubs, and we can all choose what we prefer.
  • mrkurt 10y ago
    The people who can work towards diversified hiring aren't the same people who can work towards diversified founding teams. They're both necessary, I think.
  • droopyEyelids 10y ago
    Dude, that is sharp thinking. Really turns the whole approach to this issue on it's head and poses some interesting questions.
• DigitalSea 10y ago
  I consider myself a competent developer, but I have no academic background as I am self-taught. While I have had a steady supply of work, because of this, I will most likely never get to work for a big company like Microsoft, Google or Facebook because I wouldn't pass their technical interview. I lack the understanding of core computer science principles and I am okay with admitting that, I don't think it makes me a bad developer or inferior to my peers who have computer science degrees. Most developers I know envy the fact I have no student debt and said if they could do it over again, they would go the self-taught route. Technical interviews are broken because they favour developers fresh out of college or with academic backgrounds. Not every development task is a coding problem or puzzle, rarely do you ever need to write your own algorithm implementation in real world situations. The times you do, most developers (even the intelligent ones) will Google. My problem solving ability is decent enough I am at a senior level and always complete what is asked of me, but give me a code golf/coding puzzle and unrealistic constraints like only being able to solve it on a whiteboard? I will fail. Ask me to solve problems on sheets of paper as quick as possible? I will fail. Give me a laptop, an IDE and ask me to build something. Better yet, sit me down with one of the developers in your team, give me a simple Jira task and ask me to help solve it pair-programming style. I would rather hire a developer who can get things done opposed to being able to solve a non-real world programming puzzle I found on Google. Interviews seem to forgo the highly acknowledged fact that developers rely on Google/StackOverflow than companies care to admit. Problem solving is one percentage of the hiring equation, being a great developer also requires patience, cooperation, understanding and communication. I think above anything else, a developer who is a good communicator is a dream combination. I would take communication skills over coding puzzle solving skills any day of the week. Even the much beloved FizzBuzz test is a scam. Any developer can memorize a FizzBuzz implementation 10 minutes prior to the interview. I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up. Maybe it worked in 1999, but not in 2016.
  • groby_b 10y ago
    Yeah... FizzBuzz still works. A large percentage of phone screens fails it. It's not meant to be a signal you're a good developer if you pass, it's meant as a signal you're an atrociously bad one if you fail. Most people don't bother to even memorize it, and those who memorize are thrown by slight variations.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• jbmorgado 10y ago
  The percentage of woman working in Google is actually above the percentage of woman with an IT degree. So there is absolutely nothing to fix in the technical interviews. At most it's slightly biased towards woman, not against them.
• bit_logic 10y ago
  This is because the technical interview has completely degenerated into an arms race. It started with good intentions. It used to be just, here's a problem, try to solve it and let's discuss. And at first it was fine. But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to "show off" and impress the interviewer. So everyone started to focus on those to impress the interviewer. Then the interviewers noticed and started to state they would only be impressed by more and more obscure algorithms and data structures. And then the real downward spiral began with the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview. More books were published, a whole industry to support this. Then came the sites like leetcode and HackerRank. Now there's a lot of money supporting and pushing for continuing this stupid process. And the arms race just keeps getting worse and worse. The interviewers expect more and more obscure algorithms and data structures and justify it with "must avoid false positives". This just increases the study time for candidates and they're willing to spend time and money to do it. And the tech interview industry (all the books and sites) are happy to push this arms race since it's more money for them. Now they have enough money to go openly defend the tech interview as the "best practice". It's not even enough to get the right answer now. You have to do it fast enough or you fail. And now they care about syntax on a whiteboard. None of this used to be true. It all started as a way to see how you approach a problem and discussing it. No expectations that you would correctly get Algorithm ABC and Data Structure XYZ. No expectation that the syntax is correct, pseudo code was ok. No expectation even on a complete working solution, the point was just to see if you can reason about the problem. All that is gone, replaced by the tech interview arms race. Now it's just a massive speed pattern matching contest to see if you've studied enough to hopefully cover the obscure problem the interviewer will pick and if you can correctly pattern match in time based on the hundreds of questions you did on leetcode. Completely useless and against the original intent of tech interviews.
  • kls 10y ago
    I postulate that false negatives are far more expensive, in a constricted talent pool. We keep seeing the adage that false positives are expensive but honestly if one cannot spot a false positive within 30 days of engagement with that person, then the hiring person should really contemplate their expertise in the field. I saw a really good write up (I think on here) where they basically did a initial "are you an idiot?" round of interviews and then contracted every person that they thought might be a viable (not good just viable) candidate with a small piece of software for 2 weeks. This amounted to 3 candidates IIRC the TL;DR was that the person they thought was least likely to perform knocked their socks off. The one that crushed the interview asked for more time and then just fell of the radar. The technical code test and trick question interview is a tired fingerprint of the industry. Honestly if one cannot spot technical talent by having a 30 minute conversation with a person, they may want to reassess where they think they are in their own technical and managerial skills, because they may want to reflect the possibility that they are engaging in a weiner waving contest as opposed to an interview, to stroke their own ego.
• throwaway420 10y ago
  I'm waiting with great anticipation for the politically correct outcry to solve the problem of not enough women being represented in the mining, construction, sanitation, logging, or deep sea fishing industries, or for there be a popular movement to get more men into teaching or nursing where they're also dramatically underrepresented there. Let's see if there's any intellectual honesty here, or maybe there's something else behind this politically correct movement? Gee, I wonder why certain people are trying to pu$h this so hard? You can ea$ily gue$$ what thi$ expan$ion of the labor $upply i$ really about if you think long and hard about it.
  • ubernostrum 10y ago
    When you have an argument that's A) deeper then a copy/paste soundbite, B) doesn't contain an informal fallacy ("how dare you try to fix this one instance of a problem until you've fixed every other instance of it first, and I'll use this no matter which instance you go after first"), and C) doesn't require you to look like a 1990s $la$hdot u$er talking about Micro$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$oft, maybe we could have a constructive conversation. But the tone of your comment suggests you're not really interested in it, y'know?
    • solipsism 10y ago
      Not to mention the throwaway account. I wish HN would fix that problem already. It brings the level of discourse way down.
      • labster 10y ago
        I doubt they will. The universe just isn't about you, solipsism.
      • throw_away_777 10y ago
        Throwaway accounts allow people to express views that aren't politically correct. If all your views are politically correct this may seem like a bad thing, but for people with views that aren't politically correct throw away accounts allow participation.
• xorgar831 10y ago
  I've seen a number of tech interviews where the interviewer has played down candidates that were better than them (consciously or not). I've also been a interviewee many times and sensed a one-upmanship from the interviewer(s), and subsequently avoid those companies. I could easily see this also being another factor if someone isn't in tune with the norms of the industry to call BS and walk.
• return0 10y ago
  Why not try unorthodox solutions: cap engineering salaries so men no longer rush to fill the jobs.
  • aries1980 10y ago
    Not unheard solution. Russia did something similar in the 1920s, but it turned out to be an epic fail.
  • Shanea93 10y ago
    People normally only care about poor diversity in careers where the pay is good - you rarely hear people complaining about the diversity of cleaners, milk delivery personnel or train drivers. If the pay dropped, I have a strong feeling that the calls for increased diversity in tech would cease quickly, replaced with complaints about diversity in accountancy or some other high net worth career.
• shados 10y ago
  Let. us. fire. people. The current environment in tech is as follow: Someone goes through an interview process. Depending on the result, they get brought in or not. If they are brought in, they accept an offer. Usually it will contain some kind of language about blah blah trial period 3 months blah blah, sometimes in precise terminology, sometimes vaguely. If someone is absolutely useless right off the bat, immediately everyone's like "but but we need to coach them, they just started, they'll get better". If after 3 months they're still useless, then it's "Blah blah it's the company's responsibility to keep them around and coach them because we hired them and we failed at interview". That can only happen so many times (and can ruin teams or entire companies) before you start getting downright paranoid when interviewing. Maybe you have a lot of false positive and false negative, but if your interview process is Google-like enough, on average you'll turn out okay-ish (source: Google/Facebook/Netflix/whatever other company with such an interview process. They have some pretty strong teams in there). But since it's so hard to get rid of a bad apple, you can't take risks (Im being told Netflix is good at getting rid of people). Change the game a bit: make it easy to get rid of bad apples early on. You know the interview process is bad anyway. Give people a chance. If they're actually competent, they have nothing to worry about. They'll get hired, prove their worth, and stick around. If they're bad, well, bye bye. Then we no longer have to rely on excruciatingly stupid interview processes. A lot of people think this is inhumane/heartless. That big evil corporations MUST provide people with jobs and must keep them no matter how bad they are because they have bills to pay. I say its heartless to not give people a chance to prove themselves (or to fail while at least trying).
  • flukus 10y ago
    It already happens, it's called contracting. And the results are terrible because no one gives a fuck about quality at a job the might not have in 3 months.
    • mdorazio 10y ago
      Small caveat - I'd say contract-to-hire is what many places are implementing if they actually want the headcount instead of just a budget expenditure. The problem is that you end up with worse candidates because most people who are really good don't want the uncertainty and stigma of a contract position if they can get a full-time one elsewhere.
• fatdog 10y ago
  Want diversity? Teach diverse people to start companies.
• crimsonalucard 10y ago
  Article implies that the pipeline isn't the main problem. However flawed interviewing is lack of diversity in tech is 99% a pipeline problem. It's really easy to see why. All you need to do is look at the number of minorities with Tech degrees. Boom problem solved. (Keep in mind that tech encompasses many things and is not exclusively localized to the software world. While in software many people can get a job without a degree, in general, all tech jobs require a degree. )
• h4nkoslo 10y ago
  What indicates "diversity in tech" is broken? Are there notable examples of wildly successful companies that credibly attribute their success to "diversity", in the same way they attribute it to low overhead, technological innovation, economies of scale, etc? There have been historical examples of companies that became successful by tapping into cheaper sources of labor (notably in the agricultural sector). Is this what is meant by "diversity"?
• h4nkoslo 10y ago
  The easiest way to fix "diversity in tech" would be to reduce the number of H1B visas, which in the tech sector overwhelmingly go to overwhelmingly overrepresented Asians. But in practice, "diversity" is ~exclusively used as an anti-white & especially anti-white-male cudgel, so of course that will not happen.
• cleandreams 10y ago
  I found the article interesting and it sync'd with my experience in one significant way. When I started doing interviews after nearly a decade at the same job I was way out of practice. I blew an interview at Google, I still feel embarrassed thinking about it. But then I upped my game, by taking Coursera classes on algorithms, hacker rank, etc. I really worked on it. I ended up getting so much better. Got a good job. As for the article, it is interesting to me that women are 7x more likely to give up after blowing an interview. Obviously they don't realize how much practice makes perfect.
• thegayngler 10y ago
  I think it makes more sense to hire people you like who you think can do the job. Then train those individuals to be the employees you want. That is where your diversity will come in. What happened to businesses and people investing in and training other people? Sure they may walk in a dud in your eyes but there is no reason why they should stay that way. Secondly, many companies can take a good engineer, not use them correctly, run them off or turn them into a bad engineer for your company. There is too much emphasis on what a candidate already is and not enough emphasis on what you can mold your candidate to be after they are hired. Training people on the job is where your diversity will come from. I noticed that many people got in the door with less skill than the people they are hiring.
  • mdorazio 10y ago
    From a purely utility-maximizing perspective, it's easy to see what happened. Training people costs time and money, both in non-productivity of the new person, and lost productivity from the people training them. Also, there's a fair to good chance that once you train a new person and they get a couple years of experience, they will jump ship and leave you in the same position as when you started. If you look at it this way, it's better to hire a person who can already do the job than it is to hire someone who might be able to do it with a lot of training. (And yes I know it's a chicken and egg problem of who betrayed whom first with respect to long-term employee retention over the last few decades). The notable exception to this thinking is in established firms where there is a specific methodology and persona they wish all employees to have. Ex. the major consultancies, law firms, investment banks, etc. For them, it's generally best to pick a completely fresh person (new grad) and mold them into exactly what the company wants without having to "undo" things they may have learned elsewhere.
    • thegayngler 10y ago
      I can certainly see where you are coming from. As you stated, it is a chicken and egg problem somewhat. However, if the person has no background whatsoever that's actually different than someone who has some verifiable experience but just isn't what you would like initially. Wouldn't it make sense to take in someone who has some experience then train them. Sure they may leave but they may not if you treat them well. An employee leaving in the tech world is always a risk. I notice many companies spend all of their efforts hiring but very little effort is exerted to retain people. At the end of the day the tech world could stand to give back to the community in some way. If it means taking on a bit more hiring risk, its a small service to the communities they've taken so much from.
• MustardTiger 10y ago
  So, you have no evidence that this "problem" is actually a problem. You have no evidence that your solution to this "problem" actually solves it. And in fact, the only evidence you present indicates that the thing you are blaming ("technical interviews" which you present as a strawman of puzzles) has nothing to do with the diversity "problem". But we should buy your solution anyways?
• GIFtheory 10y ago
  I believe that the problem with a lot of these tech interviews is that they reflect a deep-seated belief on the part of the interviewer, that there exists such a thing as absolute intelligence, that it is immutable, and it is the most important factor in hiring. When you think in these terms, racism seems almost inevitable: after all, if intelligence is a measurable, absolute, and immutable quantity, akin to height or skin color, then shouldn't it also be hereditable? Instead of administering thinly-veiled intelligence tests, interviewers should hire based on two factors: technical skill, and more importantly, the ability to acquire it (i.e., learn). You don't want to hire (or be) a person who believes in the fiction of genius. You want to be and hire the kind of person who believes and demonstrates that ability is a deterministic function of practice, not genes.
• known 10y ago
  And you can't fix technical interview without fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority
• throwaway3586 10y ago
  Notice that according to the very figures cited by the article and released by Google and Facebook, as well as other uncited figures released by Yahoo, Amazon, and LinkedIn, whites are actually underrepresented with respect to the general population of white Americans, not overrepresented, and minorities collectively are therefore actually overrepresented, not underrepresented. This is primarily due to Asians being so overrepresented with respect to the general population of Asian Americans, by as much as a factor of ten. Yet amazingly, the charges that tech "lacks diversity," is "too white," or even "overwhelmingly white"[1][2][3] haven't let up even as the hard data refuting them has become available, and may even have intensified. In fact, many of these critics, like the author of the linked article, actually attempt to use the very data that refutes their point to somehow support it--an indication, perhaps, of the "post-fact" era leftists so often complain we're now living in. Little wonder is it then that Trump's white supporters despise journalists so much, considering how deeply so many journalists seem to despise white Americans. 1) http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-males/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-male... 2) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/02/googles-staff-worldwide-still-overwhelmingly-white-and-asian-men https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/02/googles-s... 3) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/21/why-we-should-diversify-the-overwhelming-white-u-s-teaching-force-and-how/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/...
• deleted 10y ago
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• debt 10y ago
  technical interviews are asinine. they make ya feel pretty good but cmon anyone with half a brain knows it's all bullshit. Like seriously this is the best idea we have as software engineers? tell me the big o of an algorithm that can reverse a string? a lil quiz Dustin muskovitz helped build FB he learned php from a perl for dummies book in one weekend. there's 1000's of these stories all over the world but just replace billions with thousands and millions of dollars but u get it referrals are preferential because we don't wanna hire someone we can't immediately fire if they suck. how about how badly do you want this job or how eager are you to learn
• kahrkunne 10y ago
  Or maybe these "diverse" people often don't want to go into tech, and we should be so eager to point to the racism spook, lest racism it's meaning (if everybody is racist, nobody is)
• peruin123 10y ago
  https://goo.gl/6qSPBC https://goo.gl/6qSPBC
• hogrammer 10y ago
  Tech is very diverse. Silicon Valley companies have fewer white people than the general population of the US. I scared of what will be mandated when we get a President who believes the 'women only make 73 cents' lie. Will we be forced to hire women with 'gender studies' degrees for engineering teams? The opposite of quality is equality. BTW: I am a woman with a Ph.D. in EE, of mid-eastern ethnicity. I don't want people to think I had to have a softer interview because I don't have a penis.
• heisenbit 10y ago
  There is a significant pipeline problem. Recently there was an article on HN that women are doing reasonably well these days except in the top suite. Again a pipeline issue. Some countries are further ahead like e.g. Scandinavia and India. Pipeline issues are solved in kindergarten, school by teachers and parents. Role-models and incentives can help. Interviewing is too late. Actually considering that almost all CS grads are employed it is totally ridiculous to assume interviewing will fix anything. A woman can only be hired once. Making the hiring process 100% objective is dangerous and I'm looking at these instrumented technical interviews as a step in the wrong direction. Of course we can reduce all observations to a single measure and then line everyone up against it. Any yes, that is happening in the end somehow in any case. But there is a huge difference in letting machine (or rigid scheme) do it. Letting algorithms decide is convenient. It avoids taking responsibility. It allows avoidance of accountability. And more often than not it allows unaccountable manipulation of the process - as particularly the unscrupulous will know and not stop putting a thumb on the scale.
• gandolfinmyhead 10y ago
  diversity in tech is not a problem. The problem is tech attitude in these diverse groups.
• EJTH 10y ago
  So because some people are easy quitters you should just drop a very important metric from the interview process? Sometimes i think that "diversity consultant" is code word for mentally handicapped...
  • sctb 10y ago
    > Sometimes i think that "diversity consultant" is code word for mentally handicapped... This is not the kind of civil discussion the guidelines ask us to have on Hacker News. Please don't post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • EJTH 10y ago
      I don't think that it violates any of those, but on the otherhand your post does violate the rules for comments. I was trying to make a point relevant to the OP, that 'diversity consultancy' is a job title comparable to 'snake oil salesman'
• facepalm 10y ago
  If interviewing was the problem, it would imply that there are a lot of unemployed female developers (thousands and thousands - if they all were hired, we would expect a huge increase in percentage of female devs, so the number of unemployed female developers has to be a huge percentage of the number of all developers). Is that the case? How many unemployed female developers are there? The other premise, that "diverse people" get less chance to practice interviewing, also seems bogus to me. I don't think good developers go through that many interviews and/or job applications before they get hired. It may well be that interviewing is broken, what with the unreliable outcome, but it would be broken for everybody in the same way.
• monkey88 10y ago
  This is not about rejection and going on about the process. Yes, it is somewhat a numbers game, but what leads to rejection? For a person of color to even get to the interview process, you have to be lucky. Now that you have a PoC in the room with other people, thay same PoC has to prove beyond their subconcious biases and prejudices that they are indeed, better than anybody else in the world for that job, including the interviewers. BUT at the same time, that PoC has to deal with the bias and not be too good, lest they offend the people conducting the interview, and not get offended by the blatant racist, misogynist, xenophobic comments that are going to show up in that interview. Some examples? "Do you know ho to read email?". "So you are an expert, and you proved solving all these technical problems and your resume, but how exactly can you prove that you are an expert?". "You have an accent". "Our clients want someody more like them, white". "You are too exotic for our group". Yes, all of those have happened.
• scarface74 10y ago
  some people just aren't good at technical interviewing but on the other hand there are a lot of bad interviewers. I work with a guy I interviewed that gave one of the worst interview performances I had done. He couldn't answer many of the technical questions correctly or only had a surface understanding of them. But, from asking him the soft skill questions I knew he would work well with our team. Then we gave him two simple programming assignment that many of the more senior developers we interviewed couldn't do. He didn't know the syntax of the language well, but you could tell from his thought process, the questions he asked, and how we solved the problem that he was as Joel Spolsky said "smart and gets stuff done". I along with my manager fought to get him hired. We were right about him. He's very effective, diligent, and if I ever got my own team at another company, I would fight to bring him on to work with me.
• deleted 10y ago
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• YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  I don't think that first diagram really supports the OP's point. If you look at the top performing interviewees, the ones with a mean of 4, you can see that the majority seems to have scored no less than 3, even in their sub-par interviews. There's a steep drop in standard deviation at that end of the curve. It seems that the people who do best at interviews do so pretty consistently indeed. The OP makes this point: they say that the tech interview is a game that can be learned, and that the problem is that people may drop out before they have the chance to learn it. That certainly rings true, but I don't see that their (scarce) data shows that employers want to reform their practice. For one thing, employers may conclude that if consistency is higher for the best performers that's a sign that the tech interview is indeed a good proxy of skill. And if it causes lots of people to drop out, well that's probably a bonus: fewer applications to sift through, fewer people hired that shouldn't be and overall less uncertainty and churn [1]. ______________ [1] Managerese for not having a clue how to manage.
• boggydepot 10y ago
  Man. Why not just accept folks who might not yet be so good and train him/her. Of course determine if he/she is genuinely willing to learn. Looking at hobby projects should be an indicator that he/she is passionate on programming. But of course, capitalism compels a company to hire only the best worker to get the most out of the usurped-capital. What I wanna point out is. It would be great if it was common for companies to help out less skilled programmers. Helping others is more important than making profit. The next time somebody asks me for help. I'll do my best use any surplus value out of the meager salary I get working here in a third world country.