5 ms·

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

by ch4s3 10y ago

ybrah 10y ago
Women are more likely to get hired to solve the unequal distribution of female/male engineers. This makes it more likely to have less qualified female engineers, and more qualified male engineers, since hiring requirements for men are more strict. A higher average of under qualified females compared to under qualified male engineers will lead to more code getting reject from the female counterpart.
- accountyaccount 10y ago
  This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.
  - Sacho 10y ago
    Not necessarily. If the pool of talent is exactly the same(let's say 1000 women and 1000 men) and your interviewing process is perfect at determining engineer quality, but you are hiring 80 women and 20 men, then you'll hire the top 2% of men and the top 8% of women. Again, just assuming that the talent is exactly the same, the women you've hired will still be worse. In reality, the pool of female talent is very shallow. Again assuming the talent levels are exactly the same, there's just not enough highly-skilled women to go around, e.g. if you're trying to hire the top 1% of engineers, and you have a pool of 1 million men and 100,000 women, then you're looking at 10000 men and 1000 women as your potential hires. If the top 1000 women are already taken, then you're forced to relax your interview requirements for women. In fact, if the pool is completely free for your usage, but you're looking to hire 10000 men and 10000 women, you'll be hiring the top 1% of male talent and down to the top 10% of female talent, which should lead to a difference in output. This doesn't mean that "sexism" isn't real or that it's not a problem women face in the workplace. The question however, is how to measure the effectiveness of "anti-sexism" practices employed, if you cannot measure the effect of "sexism" itself, as it is entangled with all the other, confounding factors. You can't optimize performance if you can't measure the effects your solutions have on it.
    - jlebrech 10y ago
      the onus shouldn't be on multinationals to hire 50/50 gender, but on smaller companies that need lower skills and can accommodate junior roles. or maybe multinationals should be honest about hiring juniors, and think that would be good PR for them rather than just let people use their staff as a statistic.
  - cazum 10y ago
    Not at all. If the skill requirement is lower for women to get into the same position as men, is it not rational that, on average, those women will perform poorer than the men? Imagine they did the same thing for university entrance: men need all prerequisite courses and a 3.8gpa, whereas women need only 75% of prereqs and a 2.9gpa. It only makes sense that the women are going to score lower in exams/flunk out, since their initial starting point was, on average, further behind.
  - rndgermandude 10y ago
    That wasn't said. There are certainly good and bad developers no matter what gender. If you have stricter hiring policies for men and e.g. only the top 10% of male candidates land a job while the less strict hiring procedures for females get the top 40% females a job, then you created an imbalance in skills between the genders in your company (and only there), and this is what might have happened here
    - jlebrech 10y ago
      and the strict hiring process for men is bad for women in the long run.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    No, there's no biased assumption that women are worse developers, just one about relative numbers and relative skill distribution. If the number of qualified female developers is less than the number of qualified male developers, then any company which manages to achieve hiring parity has either lowered the qualifications it demands from women developers, or increased the incentives it offers to them relative to other firms (enabling it to capture a higher share of high-skill female developers). Since the latter approach is obviously discriminatory and quite possibly illegal (not to mention a blatant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work), the former is more likely. The result of the former is that the median female developer at that company will have lower skill than the median male developer at the same company, even if women in the population at large have the same or better development skill. The incentive strategy could enable a firm to secure the best female talent, but besides the ethical and legal implications it would also make things much worse for all the other firms out there: the best female talent being off the market, those firms would be forced to either settle for lesser-skilled women or accept a disproportionate share of male developers, neither of which would be appealing. Naturally, increasing the supply of women developers to match that of male developers (or reducing the supply of male developers …) would improve the situation, but that's a horse of a different colour.
  - ythn 10y ago
    It's more like... if 1 good female developer gets a CS degree for every 10 good male developers, you would expect the workforce to be 10% female. However, if you artificially force 50% female representation you'll have to start drawing upon bad female developers since the rate of good developers is currently only 10%. You first have to increase the output of good female developers from schools before you can scale up their representation in the workforce, not the other way around.
    - jlebrech 10y ago
      one might say that "you have to increase the means of production"
jjawssd 10y ago
"(...) However, Facebook employees now speculate that Parikh’s findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast as male counterparts who joined the company at the same time, or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted." > Code rejected due to rank > Women are of lower rank than men > We need to promote more women faster Facebook is about to get a taste of their own medicine.
- panzer_wyrm 10y ago
  We will have interesting case of positive feedback in that case. If FB female code is of objectively lower quality promotions should make things worse. If it is not - it will be fixed.
leshow 10y ago
Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.
- jlebrech 10y ago
  I was going to elaborate in my original post, but I like my upvotes.
- jlebrech 10y ago
  I like your non-bigoted explanation, I wouldn't have expressed it in such a way.
- fahadkhan 10y ago
  that's not quite the cobra effect. For that the number of female developers would need to have been reduced and not code quality.
- ch4s3 10y ago
  You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring? To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.
  - _pergosausage 10y ago
    I suppose that if a company is going to try to artificially hire a greater number of a single group then naturally the bar must be lowered. Take this hypotherital: Bob's factory employs machinists to make parts. Of all machinists, 20% belong to group A and 80% belong to group B. When hiring, Bob's factory selects a number of applicants who pass the test. If we assume that group A and group B have the same average skill level then naturally the employees in the factory will be 20% group A and 80% group B. If Bob wanted to hire eaqual amounts of Group A and Group B, then he would need to hire as much of group a as possible and as little of group b as possible. If bob could only hire a certain number of group b, then he would naturally only pick the best few. Thus, artificially eaquallizing the work force in bobs factory must neccecarily lead to a skill gap.
k__ 10y ago
They wanted more women. Dropped the hiring bar for female devs. Got more mediocre devs. Those got bad reviews. Then they blamed it on sexism, which reduced the women willing to go into tech even more. -- edit -- I don't know if it went that way or not, it's just an explanation on how their problem would map to the cobra effect.
cazum 10y ago
I believe they meant this in the context of popular gender gap solutions. More specifically, the situation where pressure is put on teams to weigh gender as more important than skill in the hiring process to bring teams to gender-parity. The result of this is female employees submitting worse code. This isn't because women are inherently any worse at writing software than men are, it's simply that the employer has a smaller pool of talent to pick from.

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

by ch4s3 10y ago

Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

ybrah 10y ago

Women are more likely to get hired to solve the unequal distribution of female/male engineers. This makes it more likely to have less qualified female engineers, and more qualified male engineers, since hiring requirements for men are more strict. A higher average of under qualified females compared to under qualified male engineers will lead to more code getting reject from the female counterpart.

accountyaccount 10y ago
This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.
- Sacho 10y ago
  Not necessarily. If the pool of talent is exactly the same(let's say 1000 women and 1000 men) and your interviewing process is perfect at determining engineer quality, but you are hiring 80 women and 20 men, then you'll hire the top 2% of men and the top 8% of women. Again, just assuming that the talent is exactly the same, the women you've hired will still be worse. In reality, the pool of female talent is very shallow. Again assuming the talent levels are exactly the same, there's just not enough highly-skilled women to go around, e.g. if you're trying to hire the top 1% of engineers, and you have a pool of 1 million men and 100,000 women, then you're looking at 10000 men and 1000 women as your potential hires. If the top 1000 women are already taken, then you're forced to relax your interview requirements for women. In fact, if the pool is completely free for your usage, but you're looking to hire 10000 men and 10000 women, you'll be hiring the top 1% of male talent and down to the top 10% of female talent, which should lead to a difference in output. This doesn't mean that "sexism" isn't real or that it's not a problem women face in the workplace. The question however, is how to measure the effectiveness of "anti-sexism" practices employed, if you cannot measure the effect of "sexism" itself, as it is entangled with all the other, confounding factors. You can't optimize performance if you can't measure the effects your solutions have on it.
  - jlebrech 10y ago
    the onus shouldn't be on multinationals to hire 50/50 gender, but on smaller companies that need lower skills and can accommodate junior roles. or maybe multinationals should be honest about hiring juniors, and think that would be good PR for them rather than just let people use their staff as a statistic.
- cazum 10y ago
  Not at all. If the skill requirement is lower for women to get into the same position as men, is it not rational that, on average, those women will perform poorer than the men? Imagine they did the same thing for university entrance: men need all prerequisite courses and a 3.8gpa, whereas women need only 75% of prereqs and a 2.9gpa. It only makes sense that the women are going to score lower in exams/flunk out, since their initial starting point was, on average, further behind.
- rndgermandude 10y ago
  That wasn't said. There are certainly good and bad developers no matter what gender. If you have stricter hiring policies for men and e.g. only the top 10% of male candidates land a job while the less strict hiring procedures for females get the top 40% females a job, then you created an imbalance in skills between the genders in your company (and only there), and this is what might have happened here
  - jlebrech 10y ago
    and the strict hiring process for men is bad for women in the long run.
- zeveb 10y ago
  No, there's no biased assumption that women are worse developers, just one about relative numbers and relative skill distribution. If the number of qualified female developers is less than the number of qualified male developers, then any company which manages to achieve hiring parity has either lowered the qualifications it demands from women developers, or increased the incentives it offers to them relative to other firms (enabling it to capture a higher share of high-skill female developers). Since the latter approach is obviously discriminatory and quite possibly illegal (not to mention a blatant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work), the former is more likely. The result of the former is that the median female developer at that company will have lower skill than the median male developer at the same company, even if women in the population at large have the same or better development skill. The incentive strategy could enable a firm to secure the best female talent, but besides the ethical and legal implications it would also make things much worse for all the other firms out there: the best female talent being off the market, those firms would be forced to either settle for lesser-skilled women or accept a disproportionate share of male developers, neither of which would be appealing. Naturally, increasing the supply of women developers to match that of male developers (or reducing the supply of male developers …) would improve the situation, but that's a horse of a different colour.
- ythn 10y ago
  It's more like... if 1 good female developer gets a CS degree for every 10 good male developers, you would expect the workforce to be 10% female. However, if you artificially force 50% female representation you'll have to start drawing upon bad female developers since the rate of good developers is currently only 10%. You first have to increase the output of good female developers from schools before you can scale up their representation in the workforce, not the other way around.
  - jlebrech 10y ago
    one might say that "you have to increase the means of production"

jjawssd 10y ago

"(...) However, Facebook employees now speculate that Parikh’s findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast as male counterparts who joined the company at the same time, or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted." > Code rejected due to rank > Women are of lower rank than men > We need to promote more women faster Facebook is about to get a taste of their own medicine.

panzer_wyrm 10y ago
We will have interesting case of positive feedback in that case. If FB female code is of objectively lower quality promotions should make things worse. If it is not - it will be fixed.

leshow 10y ago

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

jlebrech 10y ago
I was going to elaborate in my original post, but I like my upvotes.
jlebrech 10y ago
I like your non-bigoted explanation, I wouldn't have expressed it in such a way.
fahadkhan 10y ago
that's not quite the cobra effect. For that the number of female developers would need to have been reduced and not code quality.
ch4s3 10y ago
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring? To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.
- _pergosausage 10y ago
  I suppose that if a company is going to try to artificially hire a greater number of a single group then naturally the bar must be lowered. Take this hypotherital: Bob's factory employs machinists to make parts. Of all machinists, 20% belong to group A and 80% belong to group B. When hiring, Bob's factory selects a number of applicants who pass the test. If we assume that group A and group B have the same average skill level then naturally the employees in the factory will be 20% group A and 80% group B. If Bob wanted to hire eaqual amounts of Group A and Group B, then he would need to hire as much of group a as possible and as little of group b as possible. If bob could only hire a certain number of group b, then he would naturally only pick the best few. Thus, artificially eaquallizing the work force in bobs factory must neccecarily lead to a skill gap.

k__ 10y ago

They wanted more women. Dropped the hiring bar for female devs. Got more mediocre devs. Those got bad reviews. Then they blamed it on sexism, which reduced the women willing to go into tech even more. -- edit -- I don't know if it went that way or not, it's just an explanation on how their problem would map to the cobra effect.

cazum 10y ago

I believe they meant this in the context of popular gender gap solutions. More specifically, the situation where pressure is put on teams to weigh gender as more important than skill in the hiring process to bring teams to gender-parity. The result of this is female employees submitting worse code. This isn't because women are inherently any worse at writing software than men are, it's simply that the employer has a smaller pool of talent to pick from.