4 ms·

Is it possible that the hiring standards for women at FB is lower than that of their male counterparts, resulting in a larger number of issues with their code?

• ng12 9y ago
  I once worked at a "hot" tech company that had a formal policy where HR had to get involved before rejecting a borderline candidate if they were female. It was a shame -- up until that point there were few female engineers but they were all brilliant. After that policy was implemented you had to wonder which were the token hires.
  • zigzigzag 9y ago
    The issue is not necessarily hiring. There was a story on HN a while back saying how Facebook recruiters had stopped bothering to target women specifically because even though they were heavily incentivised to do so, the FB hiring committees weren't on board with the whole positive discrimination thing so it wasn't working. However, the big tech firms do seem to have a problem with firing. I've heard this several times now from other people and saw it myself when I worked at Google. Hiring is never 100% accurate and so even if hiring itself is unbiased (questionable at best), without unbiased firing the quality of that segment of the worker pool goes downwards over time. Even though the engineers often truly believe in a meritocracy, HR in particular is a strongly female dominated profession and unfortunately I do suspect a "sisters gotta stick together" mentality because I saw within the span of a single year at Google a man get canned for merely not being particularly productive, whilst a woman who openly and repeatedly lied in meetings (and lied very badly at that), and who caused her team huge heartache due to her terrible quality work, was not only not fired but in the end promoted into management. It was widely known that women who weren't very good or caused trouble were almost impossible to get rid of and were typically transferred around between teams rather than shown the door.
• pipiipiippi 9y ago
  There has been a research on unconscious bias towards minorities. Basically given the same papers, the number of corrections and comments was significantly higher when the papers had names of minorities or something. That kind of ironically proves that it's beneficial to hire more women given the same qualifications, doesn't it? haha. People would look at women's code much more carefully and there will be fewer bugs in the end. I personally had a few cases where I just copied an approach of some guy (e.g. using a certain library that a similar application was using) but I had to change that during the code review. I mentioned this and had to change his code as well. How did he get through this rigorous code review in the first place? I don't know. Maybe people found him more trust-worthy and assumed his work was perfect. :/
• olleromam91 9y ago
  HOW DARE YOU IMPLY THAT WOMEN KNOW LESS THAN MEN! /s
• bingomad123 9y ago
  This is bound to happen when you focus more on core business goals and spend too much time talking about diversity.