17 ms·

How Lever (YC S12) Got to 50–50 Women and Men

76 points by tzar 10y ago

redthrowaway 10y ago
This progressive-SV obsession with diversity is a pretty odd shibboleth from an outsider's perspective. Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves, or brag about it? There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than your applicant pool: 1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. In which case, congratulations? But it's nothing to brag about. And it's only possible for low-n. The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later. 2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. 3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find ones who are both excellent and have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending yours building better products and connecting with your customers. All this, for what? Plaudits in the tech press? Maybe attracting investment from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide range of immutable characteristics of birth? You haven't made your products better, and you haven't connected with your customers more. You've either hired a worse team or wasted your time. If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.
- noobermin 10y ago
  I think a large assumption you've made is what the make up of their applicant pool is, which I too have no idea what that looks like.
  - redthrowaway 10y ago
    It's not an assumption I'm making at all. It's an independent variable. I'm assuming that talent is more or less uniformly distributed among applicants. If that assumption is true, then an optimal hiring process will, with sufficient hires, produce a workforce that broadly resembles the pool of applicants. More formally, under an optimal recruitment system, as the number of hires approaches infinity, the Levenshtein distance between the anatomical characteristics of the workforce and applicant pool approaches zero.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  I can imagine many scenarios where even without biasing your hiring that your company doesn't look, demographically, like your hiring pool. For example, if your candidate pool is 80% foreign and you have a limited number of visas to offer. One can also imagine that if you are a particularly "female-friendly" company, word of mouth and primarily-female contact networks (e.g. women who know each other through female-only meetups or "girls who code" style events) would naturally bias your most qualified candidates towards being women, particularly if almost all your competitors are either seen as "female unfriendly" and/or don't have access to the primarily-female contact network.
  - drawnwren 10y ago
    Your first argument is satisfied by 2 and 3 of the post you replied to. Your second argument boils down to, 'perhaps they have a larger female applicant pool than you suspect.' However, it doesn't really seem support an argument that the company will look different than the applicant pool.
    - x1798DE 10y ago
      Well, I'm assuming "applicant pool" means the pool of all people applying. My point was that even if women are a small portion of the applicant pool, they may represent a larger quality-weighted portion of the total applicant pool. I agree that if as your population becomes large, you should asymptotically be approaching the demographics of your quality-weighted applicant pool. Note: By "quality-weighted" I really mean something more complicated like "ROI-weighted", since it could also be that because of your reputation as a "female-friendly" employer, high-quality female employees will be willing to work at a lower salary than they would otherwise demand at a "male-dominated" workplace (e.g. "Well, company X pays better, but I really like the culture/people/policies at company Y...")
  - redthrowaway 10y ago
    How does one gain a reputation for being "female-friendly" (or hispanic-firendly, or gay-friendly, or whatever) without going through one of the three steps above? Personal networks are huge in hiring, but you have to have a lot of women working for you before you'll have access to a lot of female personal networks. And given how many companies in SV are scrambling to hire women, you have to work pretty damned hard to get them. If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend. Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Well there are a few other options. Like that some people won't work in a place where there is only one demographic, or there is a VERY large imbalance. Anecdotally I know a woman who refuses to work in a place where there aren't at least 2 other women that she will interact with on a daily basis. She's an amazing developer, but has been brought into male-only teams or teams with only one other female and it becomes an issue. And she's at a point in her life where she can require that of potential employers. So by striving for a more diverse workforce, you could be opening up doors to exceptionally good employees who have the ability to set the bar for what they want in a company. To put it more concisely, diversifying your employees can increase your hiring pool.
  - nichochar 10y ago
    This example is good but surely an edge case. Optimizing for edge cases is typically wasted effort. I think a big question is why companies do it (there is a comment thread above tackling this). A company's goal, in a capitalistic country, is to maximize profits, if you can prove that a 50/50 split does this (and getting there should be included in the cost), then great.
    - Klathmon 10y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure it's an edge case. Would you want to work somewhere that nobody shared any interests? Maybe a language barrier? Perhaps a place where you would be bullied? or be talked down to constantly? If you had to choose between a place like that, or a place that you would "fit in" better, which would you choose? It stands to reason that the "best" candidates are going to have a choice in where they work. Hell, even "slightly above average" candidates can often have a choice between multiple offers. So when you are looking for talented individuals, you are going to either need to pay more, offer some other benefits, or will need to ensure your workplace doesn't make them feel unwelcome. Personally I think of diversifying your employees like buying a pingpong table for the break room, or paying for lunch a day or 2 a week. It's a small price to pay, that can pay off big time when hiring. And that seems like a big enough "reason" for me to want to do it.
    - geofft 10y ago
- warcher 10y ago
  Everybody's hiring practices are pretty broken. As a white male engineer, I've never really had any success even getting an interview with ordinary tech companies out of engineering school. Had to start my own. Going ok, has been for many years now, which leads me to think all those guys throwing my resume in the trash may have some false negatives in their system somewhere. I think there are objective benefits to fixing some of the weird culture in tech, including but not limited to (at least) doubling the available talent pool. And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams. I'm not so stupid as to think there aren't costs associated with bringing populations that aren't well represented in. There's gonna be catchup. You're going to have to develop talent. It is going to take a while. Engineering and entrepreneurship is absolutely a hard job, and most folks aren't cut out for it, not really. So widening the net is going to take work. And bigger, more established companies are probably better equipped to shoulder more of that investment, but smaller, hungrier companies can ALSO afford to take risks on talent that has potential, but isn't a 100% safe bet.
  - warcher 10y ago
    I'll say as somebody low enough on the food chain to need to work harder at hiring, but high enough that I do make those decisions, I actively seek out folks outside the usual boxes. I look real hard for people that aren't guaranteed first-round draft picks, and who may be overlooked by the system. There are tons of great hires who aren't getting any love, you just have to know what you're really looking for, do the work, and trust your instincts. I've seen a lot of sloppy, lazy, highly risk-averse work in hiring and talent development over the years. Everybody's trying to not look stupid, not to win.
  - redthrowaway 10y ago
    >And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams. This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered. First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and socialists and libertarians. Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and cohesion is actually more correlated with engineering success than diversity of thought. Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.
- RoboticFoot 10y ago
  > Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves, or brag about it? A lot of tech people I know feel a lot of guilt because of their success. They feel as though they don't deserve it, so they look for ways to "blame" their success on external factors. One of the ways this manifests is a strong desire to politic against anything that might ostensibly be perceived as unfair. In the strongly left-leaning SV community, things like institutional sexism are very obvious targets to project internal feelings of guilt onto. I'm obviously not a psychologist or anything, but this is just my personal explanation I've built up after a few years living in the Bay Area.
- geofft 10y ago
  > If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices. Well, one, to first order everyone in the Valley has badly broken hiring practices. Two, I don't think that's true. It's extremely common for, say, top universities' freshman classes to look nothing like their applicant pools, because their applicant pools are full of people who want to go to that university but genuinely wouldn't do well there. There are a lot of people who optimize for making good grades and a perfect SAT score and have nothing to characterize them otherwise, and I would expect there are way fewer of those people, by percentage, in the freshman classes. (And yes, the modern university application process came out of anti-Semitism and there are a lot of other indefensible things about it, but this effect, I think, is defensible.) My personal hypothesis is that technical aptitude is pretty uncorrelated with demographics, but that due to (for lack of a better term) "the pipeline", certain demographics are more encouraged to stay with technical studies and apply to these roles than others. So you have demographic A, which consists of a large number of people of varying abilities, and demographic B, which is a smaller number of people who have done particularly well throughout the pipeline. A fair hiring process, that selects for people with high aptitude, would naturally reject many more people from group A (who weren't filtered out from the pipeline) than from group B.
diversary 10y ago
While they encourage diversity, they have a pretty clear hiring profile for candidates http://imgur.com/a/ZsS81 http://imgur.com/a/ZsS81
- theparanoid 10y ago
  Namely as cheap as possible. Dan Lyons's "Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up-Bubble" is insightful.
muninn_ 10y ago
Women are incredibly valuable, but there isn't anything inherently "good" about having an exactly even split M-F ratio. Is a company with 70% women and 30% men better than a 50%-50% split? What about the other way around? What about mostly men but a few women? The obsession with having an even split is, ludicrous. Should every industry have an exactly even 50%-50% ratio? Why not? Why should it? I think we need more women in highly male-dominated fields like dock working. They're good paying jobs, so why don't we have more women? Why are we always focusing on putting women in STEM and not focusing on getting women good jobs in general? The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work? The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters. The only answer I can see is to make sure women are getting good jobs. Women are clearly getting an education, since more of them are going to college than men, but are we focusing on good, well-paying jobs, or are we focusing on only the best jobs? I'm sure this will get pc-d the hell out of. But I'm just concerned that we're over-compensating. Paul Graham wrote a good article about "What you can't say". I think me saying this, even if it's idiotic or something, is an example of something I "can't say" in our society. I support women, but I support men too.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  It's a recruiting tool in many cases. Both men and women want to work for a more balanced company generally
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    I find this kind of strange. I've never thought about what percentage of asians or blacks work at a company, or what percentage are men or women before considering a job opportunity. It just has never mattered to me. 100% men, 100% women, 100% asian. I just don't care.
    - billylindeman 10y ago
      Thank you! I've also literally never given a thought to it and generally don't care. If you're smart and cooperative I'll love working with you -- male, female, trans, black, hispanic, whatever-the-fuck-label-you-want. I was raised to not judge people by whats on the outside, and the whole fetishization of ratios (be it gender or race) is sickening to me. It itself is inherently racist/sexist and only perpetuates race/gender based categorization instead of unity.
noobermin 10y ago
100 is such a small N that 50-50 could just be rounding noise, I'd think. That's why I'm glad that they care about such things, but it doesn't suggest to me that they are truly unbiased in their selection process. The only thing that makes sense to draw conclusions about wrt diversity are the make up of a) large corporations b) university output and c) the distribution of groups throughout start-ups as a whole. They might have beat the average, but without more data, it really could be anything else other than what they posit they did.
- SuperImprobable 10y ago
  The 95% confidence interval would be about 40-60%. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+interval&rawformassumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22BinomialInterval%22%7D%7D&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22c%22%7D+-%3E%220.95%22&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22n%22%7D+-%3E%22100%22&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22phat%22%7D+-%3E%220.5%22 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+in...
hogrammer 10y ago
The opposite of 'quality' is 'equality'
Archio 10y ago
I liked all of the steps taken except this one: >They developed a compensation philosophy that was conscious about not rewarding aggressive negotiators, nor punishing those who were conflict averse. I'm all for compensating employees fairly, but being able to negotiate and advocate for oneself is an incredibly important skill both in the workplace and in life. I think we as a society need to focus on reversing any cultural pressures that lead women to be conflict averse, as opposed to dumbing down the process for everyone. The way this is worded seems to imply "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves, so we take that out of the process to keep things equal".
- faitswulff 10y ago
  As an individual, I agree. As a company, however, I think it's a good move, because not every individual will agree or be able to negotiate for oneself. If a company hasn't hired that individual to do negotiation, then I don't see why they should reward or punish that employee for negotiation skills. Hence Lever's neutrality on negotiation.
  - amorphid 10y ago
    Is there a happy compromise that is good for both a company and its employees? One thought that comes to mind is hazard pay in the military. A and B are in same role and share the same base pay. But A works at a desk, and gets no hazard pay. B goes to war, and gets paid extra for dodging bullets.
- geofft 10y ago
  In my experience, the programmers who are particularly able to negotiate aggressively and are conflict-seeking achieve the goal of getting their designs adopted, which usually doesn't correlate with getting the best designs adopted. If you don't believe such a correlation exists, you get a more productive development team if you artificially avoid rewarding aggressive negotiation and self-advocacy. It's an important skill in other disciplines like sales (where the goal is to close the deal even if your company's product is unquestionably worse than the competitors' products), but not so much for engineering. I also think this isn't so much "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves" as "women who negotiate for themselves aggressively and are conflict-seeking are penalized socially for non-womanlike-behavior, so they learn not to do so." There are legitimate criticisms to be made about implicitly buying into that social standard, but it seems like an easier change to just prioritize different things in compensation, if the goal is short-term fairness in compensation.
Apocryphon 10y ago
I think that, regardless of whatever moral or ideological viewpoints one may hold, this should still be lauded as an interesting experiment in a situation that's most definitely a minority case in this industry. People should just accept this as an interesting case study and keep an open mind, regardless if they think it will have positive or negative outcomes.
- NotQuantum 10y ago
  I completely agree. Having more data points on whether or not a fully diverse work place is more effective is great.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
EduardoBautista 10y ago
It would be interesting to know what the wages are.
ladelfa 10y ago
Thought this was all great until I got to their company photo. Guess diversity at Lever doesn't apply to age. :-/
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Yes....it sort of reminds me of the HuffPo tweet about a boardroom full of women...completely neglecting that 95+% of them were white women(upon visual inspection).
  - thraway2016 10y ago
    The HuffPo staff is not 95% white, by any stretch of imagination or categorization. Only if Ashkenazi are a subset of "white".
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      http://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-genes.html http://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-europea... > The genetics suggest many of the founding Ashkenazi women were actually converts from local European populations. Okay, even if they were over-represented in Ashkenazim, where were all the Latinos and blacks? 30% should be one of those two groups if you wanted to be proportionate to the US population, but it was definitely way lower than 30%(again, by visual inspection only).
    - burkaman 10y ago
      In discussions involving racism, "white" means "white skin". Racism is usually about how people look, not genetics.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        Racism is about the groups people are placed in by societal perceptions, in which looks are a major but not the sole factor.
oh_sigh 10y ago
What I'm really interested in is do they have a population proportionate ratio of redheads to non redheads?
serge2k 10y ago
> At a different company, he noticed that a team of white engineers from affluent backgrounds chose to delay shipping an Android version of the product because they believed they would make less money on the platform. But it turned out that Android users were far more engaged than iOS ones, and the group later regretted prioritizing the wrong platform. Plenty of companies made that bet, especially if we go back a few years. Hell, nintendo just made that bet with super mario run. There are good and bad reasons to do it. I'm not really sure what the point is? These guys were wrong because they were rich white guys as opposed to they were wrong because x? > I’m considered a non-technical founder, despite the fact that I have an engineering degree from Stanford and maybe I guess I don’t look like a technical founder. Are you capable of (and/or interested in) working on the tech side of things? Then why would you not be a technical founder. If you aren't, then does the engineering degree really have any bearing? The steps they took sound reasonable. I'm curious about which were the most effective. > So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes? > They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that they would use the word “women.” Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal. I wonder if having a female founder has helped. Strong female leader, someone for people to look up to.
- patrickmay 10y ago
  >> So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce > I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes? Exactly. I don't use the dishes at work, so I'm not washing them.
- gozur88 10y ago
  >> They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that they would use the word “women.” >Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal. I found that kind of odd. I would never have said the complement (calling it opposite is weird) of "guys" is "girls". It's "gals". People will look at you funny if you say "guys and women".
nateps 10y ago
Hi! I'm Nate, another one of the Lever founders here. Have any questions about our efforts here? I'd be happy to respond.
- towlejunior 10y ago
  Did any employees express skepticism re the worthiness of this as a goal?
  - nateps 10y ago
    Yes. The skepticism was less around whether the goal of D&I is a good thing and whether it might be more important for us to invest in other things for the success of our business. We believe that inclusion is worth the investment. At the core, creating an inclusive environment is about employee engagement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement) One company that studies the importance of employee engagement consistently is Gallup. Here is an interesting article on the intersection of diversity and engagement: http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/190103/using-employee-engagement-build-diverse-workforce.aspx http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/190103/using-employee-e... "Engagement and inclusiveness are closely related. Gallup has also found that engaged employees are more likely to say their company values diverse ideas."
- what2_2 10y ago
  How do you start these conversations with the team, especially as far as wanting to reach more underrepresented groups? When our company was very small it felt reasonable to say "We need to hire more women and underrepresented minorities", but after the team grows a bit I worry people might view that as "affirmative action" of some sort in a negative way - and I don't think I know how to handle that conversation. Not to mention how this might interact with US employment laws around discrimination - I think I'm misguided in worrying about this because so many tech companies (like Lever) are vocal about their desire to hire more people from these groups, but it does feel a bit like there are landmines when discussing this topic. I feel like I don't know what kind of language / goals I should be using. I DO feel like there's a distinction between good diversity efforts and accidentally shutting out some over-represented groups that don't deserve it - but I don't really know where that line is drawn.
yeuei8 10y ago
Former Google employee here. I left last year to work for upcoming unicorn. I have made millions already. Whatever white knights and pussy hungry beta says, which is large population on this sub, women are simply bad hires in tech. Look what happened to yahoo. Women are inherent social creatures and want to take everyone with them. Competition does not work that way. If you don't create competitive product, you lose. As simple as that. I have met hundreds of women at google and they are mediocre compared to male counterparts. Trying to raise a concern will get you named as harasser. We had hiring managers exclusively looking to hire women,even though they were not qualified. No wonder Google is losing all shine and especially in cloud to Amazon.
- krastanov 10y ago
  Any one anecdote is not sufficient to establish truth, yours included. Instead we usually employ the scientific method. In that context, the following two studies (which are good, frequently quoted examples, but are reproduced in many other context) make it more plausible that your observations are either outliers, or are colored by a personal bias: - Blind interview where the gender is unknown lead to gender parity in hiring (example of a particular industry, reproduced in others): https://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 https://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 - When everything else is equal, the same applicant is rated lower if they are female: http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-battle-of-the-sexes/ http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-bat... (link to the study itself http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full ) If you would like so, I can provide some more links to aggregations, rebuttals, and meta studies that as a whole confirm the general ideas uncovered in the above studies, but with cursory googling you will be able to do the same yourself. I can agree that poorly instituted or misapplied affirmative action policies are harmful for everybody. I can agree that "PC culture" can be poisonous and detrimental. But most objective measurements do show that there is indeed bias against minorities and women. P.S. The self-aggrandizing talk about unicorns and millions is making the rest of your argument difficult to take at face value. Similarly with the fairly off putting implication that respecting women is the same as being subservient to women (the talk about "betas").
- sctb 10y ago
zxcvvcxz 10y ago
I'm skeptical of the value of this, and I really wonder what their shareholders think. Your mandate as a founder should be to recruit the best people for the jobs you need, not reach some arbitrary split in gender/age/race/whatever. Without even discussing what "groups" are being balanced, let's ask a simple question: what are the odds that 50/50 GroupA/GroupB would be the optimal split? The half-and-half sounds unnecessarily generic. Why would the company's inherent biases towards/against GroupX be superior than those imposed by a natural labor market of supply and demand? Maybe one group is slightly better suited for the company's needs, and the labor stats reflect that [0]. Maybe the founder is chasing a moral imperative moreso than maximizing shareholder value. By all means, that's their perogative. As another commenter said, if nothing else this is an interesting experiment. I wanted to leave this comment in my post history to come back to in the future, to see how things end up working out for the company in question. [0] - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-city-where-men-have-three-girlfriends-because-there-are-so-many-women-10484270.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-cit...
hal9000xp 10y ago
This whole diversity stuff is complete trendy nonsense! If a company seriously apply diversity to their hiring strategy then it actually means that at some point they must turn down some higher skilled candidate #1 in order to hire some lower skilled candidate #2 just because they have too few employees with the same gender which candidate #2 has. In this case, a company put skills at the secondary role which means that they praise mediocrity, not talent. You will be wrong if you argue, that a company don't have to prefer lower skilled candidate over higher skilled candidate just because they need to keep gender diverse teams. Because if it were possible, then highly skilled teams were already naturally gender diverse and then whole diversity talk won't exist in the first place. Don't get me wrong, as a male, I'm sick that vast majority of software engineers are male. It really sucks! It's a biggest single thing I don't like about my profession. But unfortunately it's how it is. Let's face the truth, most women are not interested in software engineering at all. In companies where I worked we had a few female software engineers, they were just as good as male engineers, no difference at all. But they were not hired because of their gender but because of their coding skills. Don't listen retarded third-wave feminists yelling about discrimination. Software engineering probably is the most meritocratic profession ever. Nobody cares about your degree (I don't have one!), citizenship, ethnicity or gender. Contribute to open source, participate in algorithm competitions, make your personal projects on GitHub and you will be noticed for sure whoever you are! It's because of a great shortage of good software developers in the market and companies are desperate to hire anyone who is able to solve their technical interview challenges.
- atroyn 10y ago
  As a self professed good software engineer, you know that debugging requires explicit and implicit assumptions to be reevaluated. Here are some you've made that may be introducing bugs into your thought process: - when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the evaluation is completely objective - highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people dissimilar to themselves - no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever experienced any - women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and workplace is heavily male dominated Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done. Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what lever appears to be doing.
plinkplonk 10y ago
Next step : equal ratios of men, women, transgender. Then gay, straight, bi Then equal ratios of every age band in a working age range Then equal ratios of race: white, AA, Hispanic, Arab, .... Then native language family. Surely the language you think in affects what you can think of - so the more the merrier Good Luck, Lever! (I am deliberately not adding a /s tag, or denying the need for one)
- hnhg 10y ago
  The point is that in society the ratio of men to women is 50/50. I'd also argue achieving that is a reasonable aim in female-dominated jobs, such as some teaching jobs.
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    I find it very distressful that you are assuming that everyone in society has to identify themselves with being male or female. That was clearly spoken from the top of your binary privilege and you should be ashamed of what you wrote.
    - deleted 10y ago
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    - deleted 10y ago
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    - benchaney 10y ago
      He did not actually make that assumption.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- Y_Y 10y ago
  Could you explain for the benefit of non-americans how Hispanics aren't white?

76 points by tzar 10y ago

This progressive-SV obsession with diversity is a pretty odd shibboleth from an outsider's perspective. Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves, or brag about it? There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than your applicant pool: 1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. In which case, congratulations? But it's nothing to brag about. And it's only possible for low-n. The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later. 2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. 3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find ones who are both excellent and have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending yours building better products and connecting with your customers. All this, for what? Plaudits in the tech press? Maybe attracting investment from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide range of immutable characteristics of birth? You haven't made your products better, and you haven't connected with your customers more. You've either hired a worse team or wasted your time. If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.

noobermin 10y ago
I think a large assumption you've made is what the make up of their applicant pool is, which I too have no idea what that looks like.
- redthrowaway 10y ago
  It's not an assumption I'm making at all. It's an independent variable. I'm assuming that talent is more or less uniformly distributed among applicants. If that assumption is true, then an optimal hiring process will, with sufficient hires, produce a workforce that broadly resembles the pool of applicants. More formally, under an optimal recruitment system, as the number of hires approaches infinity, the Levenshtein distance between the anatomical characteristics of the workforce and applicant pool approaches zero.
x1798DE 10y ago
I can imagine many scenarios where even without biasing your hiring that your company doesn't look, demographically, like your hiring pool. For example, if your candidate pool is 80% foreign and you have a limited number of visas to offer. One can also imagine that if you are a particularly "female-friendly" company, word of mouth and primarily-female contact networks (e.g. women who know each other through female-only meetups or "girls who code" style events) would naturally bias your most qualified candidates towards being women, particularly if almost all your competitors are either seen as "female unfriendly" and/or don't have access to the primarily-female contact network.
- drawnwren 10y ago
  Your first argument is satisfied by 2 and 3 of the post you replied to. Your second argument boils down to, 'perhaps they have a larger female applicant pool than you suspect.' However, it doesn't really seem support an argument that the company will look different than the applicant pool.
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    Well, I'm assuming "applicant pool" means the pool of all people applying. My point was that even if women are a small portion of the applicant pool, they may represent a larger quality-weighted portion of the total applicant pool. I agree that if as your population becomes large, you should asymptotically be approaching the demographics of your quality-weighted applicant pool. Note: By "quality-weighted" I really mean something more complicated like "ROI-weighted", since it could also be that because of your reputation as a "female-friendly" employer, high-quality female employees will be willing to work at a lower salary than they would otherwise demand at a "male-dominated" workplace (e.g. "Well, company X pays better, but I really like the culture/people/policies at company Y...")
- redthrowaway 10y ago
  How does one gain a reputation for being "female-friendly" (or hispanic-firendly, or gay-friendly, or whatever) without going through one of the three steps above? Personal networks are huge in hiring, but you have to have a lot of women working for you before you'll have access to a lot of female personal networks. And given how many companies in SV are scrambling to hire women, you have to work pretty damned hard to get them. If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend. Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.
Klathmon 10y ago
Well there are a few other options. Like that some people won't work in a place where there is only one demographic, or there is a VERY large imbalance. Anecdotally I know a woman who refuses to work in a place where there aren't at least 2 other women that she will interact with on a daily basis. She's an amazing developer, but has been brought into male-only teams or teams with only one other female and it becomes an issue. And she's at a point in her life where she can require that of potential employers. So by striving for a more diverse workforce, you could be opening up doors to exceptionally good employees who have the ability to set the bar for what they want in a company. To put it more concisely, diversifying your employees can increase your hiring pool.
- nichochar 10y ago
  This example is good but surely an edge case. Optimizing for edge cases is typically wasted effort. I think a big question is why companies do it (there is a comment thread above tackling this). A company's goal, in a capitalistic country, is to maximize profits, if you can prove that a 50/50 split does this (and getting there should be included in the cost), then great.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure it's an edge case. Would you want to work somewhere that nobody shared any interests? Maybe a language barrier? Perhaps a place where you would be bullied? or be talked down to constantly? If you had to choose between a place like that, or a place that you would "fit in" better, which would you choose? It stands to reason that the "best" candidates are going to have a choice in where they work. Hell, even "slightly above average" candidates can often have a choice between multiple offers. So when you are looking for talented individuals, you are going to either need to pay more, offer some other benefits, or will need to ensure your workplace doesn't make them feel unwelcome. Personally I think of diversifying your employees like buying a pingpong table for the break room, or paying for lunch a day or 2 a week. It's a small price to pay, that can pay off big time when hiring. And that seems like a big enough "reason" for me to want to do it.
  - geofft 10y ago
warcher 10y ago
Everybody's hiring practices are pretty broken. As a white male engineer, I've never really had any success even getting an interview with ordinary tech companies out of engineering school. Had to start my own. Going ok, has been for many years now, which leads me to think all those guys throwing my resume in the trash may have some false negatives in their system somewhere. I think there are objective benefits to fixing some of the weird culture in tech, including but not limited to (at least) doubling the available talent pool. And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams. I'm not so stupid as to think there aren't costs associated with bringing populations that aren't well represented in. There's gonna be catchup. You're going to have to develop talent. It is going to take a while. Engineering and entrepreneurship is absolutely a hard job, and most folks aren't cut out for it, not really. So widening the net is going to take work. And bigger, more established companies are probably better equipped to shoulder more of that investment, but smaller, hungrier companies can ALSO afford to take risks on talent that has potential, but isn't a 100% safe bet.
- warcher 10y ago
  I'll say as somebody low enough on the food chain to need to work harder at hiring, but high enough that I do make those decisions, I actively seek out folks outside the usual boxes. I look real hard for people that aren't guaranteed first-round draft picks, and who may be overlooked by the system. There are tons of great hires who aren't getting any love, you just have to know what you're really looking for, do the work, and trust your instincts. I've seen a lot of sloppy, lazy, highly risk-averse work in hiring and talent development over the years. Everybody's trying to not look stupid, not to win.
- redthrowaway 10y ago
  >And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams. This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered. First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and socialists and libertarians. Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and cohesion is actually more correlated with engineering success than diversity of thought. Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.
RoboticFoot 10y ago
> Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves, or brag about it? A lot of tech people I know feel a lot of guilt because of their success. They feel as though they don't deserve it, so they look for ways to "blame" their success on external factors. One of the ways this manifests is a strong desire to politic against anything that might ostensibly be perceived as unfair. In the strongly left-leaning SV community, things like institutional sexism are very obvious targets to project internal feelings of guilt onto. I'm obviously not a psychologist or anything, but this is just my personal explanation I've built up after a few years living in the Bay Area.
geofft 10y ago
> If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices. Well, one, to first order everyone in the Valley has badly broken hiring practices. Two, I don't think that's true. It's extremely common for, say, top universities' freshman classes to look nothing like their applicant pools, because their applicant pools are full of people who want to go to that university but genuinely wouldn't do well there. There are a lot of people who optimize for making good grades and a perfect SAT score and have nothing to characterize them otherwise, and I would expect there are way fewer of those people, by percentage, in the freshman classes. (And yes, the modern university application process came out of anti-Semitism and there are a lot of other indefensible things about it, but this effect, I think, is defensible.) My personal hypothesis is that technical aptitude is pretty uncorrelated with demographics, but that due to (for lack of a better term) "the pipeline", certain demographics are more encouraged to stay with technical studies and apply to these roles than others. So you have demographic A, which consists of a large number of people of varying abilities, and demographic B, which is a smaller number of people who have done particularly well throughout the pipeline. A fair hiring process, that selects for people with high aptitude, would naturally reject many more people from group A (who weren't filtered out from the pipeline) than from group B.

diversary 10y ago

While they encourage diversity, they have a pretty clear hiring profile for candidates http://imgur.com/a/ZsS81 http://imgur.com/a/ZsS81

theparanoid 10y ago
Namely as cheap as possible. Dan Lyons's "Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up-Bubble" is insightful.

muninn_ 10y ago

Women are incredibly valuable, but there isn't anything inherently "good" about having an exactly even split M-F ratio. Is a company with 70% women and 30% men better than a 50%-50% split? What about the other way around? What about mostly men but a few women? The obsession with having an even split is, ludicrous. Should every industry have an exactly even 50%-50% ratio? Why not? Why should it? I think we need more women in highly male-dominated fields like dock working. They're good paying jobs, so why don't we have more women? Why are we always focusing on putting women in STEM and not focusing on getting women good jobs in general? The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work? The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters. The only answer I can see is to make sure women are getting good jobs. Women are clearly getting an education, since more of them are going to college than men, but are we focusing on good, well-paying jobs, or are we focusing on only the best jobs? I'm sure this will get pc-d the hell out of. But I'm just concerned that we're over-compensating. Paul Graham wrote a good article about "What you can't say". I think me saying this, even if it's idiotic or something, is an example of something I "can't say" in our society. I support women, but I support men too.

tdb7893 10y ago
It's a recruiting tool in many cases. Both men and women want to work for a more balanced company generally
- muninn_ 10y ago
  I find this kind of strange. I've never thought about what percentage of asians or blacks work at a company, or what percentage are men or women before considering a job opportunity. It just has never mattered to me. 100% men, 100% women, 100% asian. I just don't care.
  - billylindeman 10y ago
    Thank you! I've also literally never given a thought to it and generally don't care. If you're smart and cooperative I'll love working with you -- male, female, trans, black, hispanic, whatever-the-fuck-label-you-want. I was raised to not judge people by whats on the outside, and the whole fetishization of ratios (be it gender or race) is sickening to me. It itself is inherently racist/sexist and only perpetuates race/gender based categorization instead of unity.

noobermin 10y ago

100 is such a small N that 50-50 could just be rounding noise, I'd think. That's why I'm glad that they care about such things, but it doesn't suggest to me that they are truly unbiased in their selection process. The only thing that makes sense to draw conclusions about wrt diversity are the make up of a) large corporations b) university output and c) the distribution of groups throughout start-ups as a whole. They might have beat the average, but without more data, it really could be anything else other than what they posit they did.

SuperImprobable 10y ago
The 95% confidence interval would be about 40-60%. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+interval&rawformassumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22BinomialInterval%22%7D%7D&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22c%22%7D+-%3E%220.95%22&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22n%22%7D+-%3E%22100%22&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22phat%22%7D+-%3E%220.5%22 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+in...

hogrammer 10y ago

The opposite of 'quality' is 'equality'

Archio 10y ago

I liked all of the steps taken except this one: >They developed a compensation philosophy that was conscious about not rewarding aggressive negotiators, nor punishing those who were conflict averse. I'm all for compensating employees fairly, but being able to negotiate and advocate for oneself is an incredibly important skill both in the workplace and in life. I think we as a society need to focus on reversing any cultural pressures that lead women to be conflict averse, as opposed to dumbing down the process for everyone. The way this is worded seems to imply "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves, so we take that out of the process to keep things equal".

faitswulff 10y ago
As an individual, I agree. As a company, however, I think it's a good move, because not every individual will agree or be able to negotiate for oneself. If a company hasn't hired that individual to do negotiation, then I don't see why they should reward or punish that employee for negotiation skills. Hence Lever's neutrality on negotiation.
- amorphid 10y ago
  Is there a happy compromise that is good for both a company and its employees? One thought that comes to mind is hazard pay in the military. A and B are in same role and share the same base pay. But A works at a desk, and gets no hazard pay. B goes to war, and gets paid extra for dodging bullets.
geofft 10y ago
In my experience, the programmers who are particularly able to negotiate aggressively and are conflict-seeking achieve the goal of getting their designs adopted, which usually doesn't correlate with getting the best designs adopted. If you don't believe such a correlation exists, you get a more productive development team if you artificially avoid rewarding aggressive negotiation and self-advocacy. It's an important skill in other disciplines like sales (where the goal is to close the deal even if your company's product is unquestionably worse than the competitors' products), but not so much for engineering. I also think this isn't so much "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves" as "women who negotiate for themselves aggressively and are conflict-seeking are penalized socially for non-womanlike-behavior, so they learn not to do so." There are legitimate criticisms to be made about implicitly buying into that social standard, but it seems like an easier change to just prioritize different things in compensation, if the goal is short-term fairness in compensation.

Apocryphon 10y ago

I think that, regardless of whatever moral or ideological viewpoints one may hold, this should still be lauded as an interesting experiment in a situation that's most definitely a minority case in this industry. People should just accept this as an interesting case study and keep an open mind, regardless if they think it will have positive or negative outcomes.

NotQuantum 10y ago
I completely agree. Having more data points on whether or not a fully diverse work place is more effective is great.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

EduardoBautista 10y ago

It would be interesting to know what the wages are.

ladelfa 10y ago

Thought this was all great until I got to their company photo. Guess diversity at Lever doesn't apply to age. :-/

oh_sigh 10y ago
Yes....it sort of reminds me of the HuffPo tweet about a boardroom full of women...completely neglecting that 95+% of them were white women(upon visual inspection).
- thraway2016 10y ago
  The HuffPo staff is not 95% white, by any stretch of imagination or categorization. Only if Ashkenazi are a subset of "white".
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    http://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-genes.html http://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-europea... > The genetics suggest many of the founding Ashkenazi women were actually converts from local European populations. Okay, even if they were over-represented in Ashkenazim, where were all the Latinos and blacks? 30% should be one of those two groups if you wanted to be proportionate to the US population, but it was definitely way lower than 30%(again, by visual inspection only).
  - burkaman 10y ago
    In discussions involving racism, "white" means "white skin". Racism is usually about how people look, not genetics.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Racism is about the groups people are placed in by societal perceptions, in which looks are a major but not the sole factor.

oh_sigh 10y ago

What I'm really interested in is do they have a population proportionate ratio of redheads to non redheads?

serge2k 10y ago

> At a different company, he noticed that a team of white engineers from affluent backgrounds chose to delay shipping an Android version of the product because they believed they would make less money on the platform. But it turned out that Android users were far more engaged than iOS ones, and the group later regretted prioritizing the wrong platform. Plenty of companies made that bet, especially if we go back a few years. Hell, nintendo just made that bet with super mario run. There are good and bad reasons to do it. I'm not really sure what the point is? These guys were wrong because they were rich white guys as opposed to they were wrong because x? > I’m considered a non-technical founder, despite the fact that I have an engineering degree from Stanford and maybe I guess I don’t look like a technical founder. Are you capable of (and/or interested in) working on the tech side of things? Then why would you not be a technical founder. If you aren't, then does the engineering degree really have any bearing? The steps they took sound reasonable. I'm curious about which were the most effective. > So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes? > They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that they would use the word “women.” Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal. I wonder if having a female founder has helped. Strong female leader, someone for people to look up to.

patrickmay 10y ago
>> So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce > I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes? Exactly. I don't use the dishes at work, so I'm not washing them.
gozur88 10y ago
>> They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that they would use the word “women.” >Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal. I found that kind of odd. I would never have said the complement (calling it opposite is weird) of "guys" is "girls". It's "gals". People will look at you funny if you say "guys and women".

nateps 10y ago

Hi! I'm Nate, another one of the Lever founders here. Have any questions about our efforts here? I'd be happy to respond.

towlejunior 10y ago
Did any employees express skepticism re the worthiness of this as a goal?
- nateps 10y ago
  Yes. The skepticism was less around whether the goal of D&I is a good thing and whether it might be more important for us to invest in other things for the success of our business. We believe that inclusion is worth the investment. At the core, creating an inclusive environment is about employee engagement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement) One company that studies the importance of employee engagement consistently is Gallup. Here is an interesting article on the intersection of diversity and engagement: http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/190103/using-employee-engagement-build-diverse-workforce.aspx http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/190103/using-employee-e... "Engagement and inclusiveness are closely related. Gallup has also found that engaged employees are more likely to say their company values diverse ideas."
what2_2 10y ago
How do you start these conversations with the team, especially as far as wanting to reach more underrepresented groups? When our company was very small it felt reasonable to say "We need to hire more women and underrepresented minorities", but after the team grows a bit I worry people might view that as "affirmative action" of some sort in a negative way - and I don't think I know how to handle that conversation. Not to mention how this might interact with US employment laws around discrimination - I think I'm misguided in worrying about this because so many tech companies (like Lever) are vocal about their desire to hire more people from these groups, but it does feel a bit like there are landmines when discussing this topic. I feel like I don't know what kind of language / goals I should be using. I DO feel like there's a distinction between good diversity efforts and accidentally shutting out some over-represented groups that don't deserve it - but I don't really know where that line is drawn.

yeuei8 10y ago

Former Google employee here. I left last year to work for upcoming unicorn. I have made millions already. Whatever white knights and pussy hungry beta says, which is large population on this sub, women are simply bad hires in tech. Look what happened to yahoo. Women are inherent social creatures and want to take everyone with them. Competition does not work that way. If you don't create competitive product, you lose. As simple as that. I have met hundreds of women at google and they are mediocre compared to male counterparts. Trying to raise a concern will get you named as harasser. We had hiring managers exclusively looking to hire women,even though they were not qualified. No wonder Google is losing all shine and especially in cloud to Amazon.

krastanov 10y ago
Any one anecdote is not sufficient to establish truth, yours included. Instead we usually employ the scientific method. In that context, the following two studies (which are good, frequently quoted examples, but are reproduced in many other context) make it more plausible that your observations are either outliers, or are colored by a personal bias: - Blind interview where the gender is unknown lead to gender parity in hiring (example of a particular industry, reproduced in others): https://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 https://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 - When everything else is equal, the same applicant is rated lower if they are female: http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-battle-of-the-sexes/ http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-bat... (link to the study itself http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full ) If you would like so, I can provide some more links to aggregations, rebuttals, and meta studies that as a whole confirm the general ideas uncovered in the above studies, but with cursory googling you will be able to do the same yourself. I can agree that poorly instituted or misapplied affirmative action policies are harmful for everybody. I can agree that "PC culture" can be poisonous and detrimental. But most objective measurements do show that there is indeed bias against minorities and women. P.S. The self-aggrandizing talk about unicorns and millions is making the rest of your argument difficult to take at face value. Similarly with the fairly off putting implication that respecting women is the same as being subservient to women (the talk about "betas").
sctb 10y ago

zxcvvcxz 10y ago

I'm skeptical of the value of this, and I really wonder what their shareholders think. Your mandate as a founder should be to recruit the best people for the jobs you need, not reach some arbitrary split in gender/age/race/whatever. Without even discussing what "groups" are being balanced, let's ask a simple question: what are the odds that 50/50 GroupA/GroupB would be the optimal split? The half-and-half sounds unnecessarily generic. Why would the company's inherent biases towards/against GroupX be superior than those imposed by a natural labor market of supply and demand? Maybe one group is slightly better suited for the company's needs, and the labor stats reflect that [0]. Maybe the founder is chasing a moral imperative moreso than maximizing shareholder value. By all means, that's their perogative. As another commenter said, if nothing else this is an interesting experiment. I wanted to leave this comment in my post history to come back to in the future, to see how things end up working out for the company in question. [0] - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-city-where-men-have-three-girlfriends-because-there-are-so-many-women-10484270.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-cit...

hal9000xp 10y ago

This whole diversity stuff is complete trendy nonsense! If a company seriously apply diversity to their hiring strategy then it actually means that at some point they must turn down some higher skilled candidate #1 in order to hire some lower skilled candidate #2 just because they have too few employees with the same gender which candidate #2 has. In this case, a company put skills at the secondary role which means that they praise mediocrity, not talent. You will be wrong if you argue, that a company don't have to prefer lower skilled candidate over higher skilled candidate just because they need to keep gender diverse teams. Because if it were possible, then highly skilled teams were already naturally gender diverse and then whole diversity talk won't exist in the first place. Don't get me wrong, as a male, I'm sick that vast majority of software engineers are male. It really sucks! It's a biggest single thing I don't like about my profession. But unfortunately it's how it is. Let's face the truth, most women are not interested in software engineering at all. In companies where I worked we had a few female software engineers, they were just as good as male engineers, no difference at all. But they were not hired because of their gender but because of their coding skills. Don't listen retarded third-wave feminists yelling about discrimination. Software engineering probably is the most meritocratic profession ever. Nobody cares about your degree (I don't have one!), citizenship, ethnicity or gender. Contribute to open source, participate in algorithm competitions, make your personal projects on GitHub and you will be noticed for sure whoever you are! It's because of a great shortage of good software developers in the market and companies are desperate to hire anyone who is able to solve their technical interview challenges.

atroyn 10y ago
As a self professed good software engineer, you know that debugging requires explicit and implicit assumptions to be reevaluated. Here are some you've made that may be introducing bugs into your thought process: - when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the evaluation is completely objective - highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people dissimilar to themselves - no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever experienced any - women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and workplace is heavily male dominated Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done. Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what lever appears to be doing.

plinkplonk 10y ago

Next step : equal ratios of men, women, transgender. Then gay, straight, bi Then equal ratios of every age band in a working age range Then equal ratios of race: white, AA, Hispanic, Arab, .... Then native language family. Surely the language you think in affects what you can think of - so the more the merrier Good Luck, Lever! (I am deliberately not adding a /s tag, or denying the need for one)

hnhg 10y ago
The point is that in society the ratio of men to women is 50/50. I'd also argue achieving that is a reasonable aim in female-dominated jobs, such as some teaching jobs.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  I find it very distressful that you are assuming that everyone in society has to identify themselves with being male or female. That was clearly spoken from the top of your binary privilege and you should be ashamed of what you wrote.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - benchaney 10y ago
    He did not actually make that assumption.
    - deleted 10y ago
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Y_Y 10y ago
Could you explain for the benefit of non-americans how Hispanics aren't white?