4 ms·

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 t

by leshow 9y 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 9y ago
I was going to elaborate in my original post, but I like my upvotes.
jlebrech 9y ago
I like your non-bigoted explanation, I wouldn't have expressed it in such a way.
fahadkhan 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
    This assumes that a job opening has a perfect distribution of applicants. Let's take another hypothetical; Bob's factory posts machinist ads on Craigslist. CL turns out to send Bob 90% males and 10% females. Bob decides to try to increase the number of females he hires, and advertises on a second site. Turns out this site is viewed by a higher percentage of females, and thus his number of female applicants increases, and the bar for hiring stays the same.
  - logandavis 9y ago
    > If we assume that group A and group B have the same average skill level This assumption, on which your argument rests, is invalid. I'm an engineering college student who's had conversations on this subject with admissions officers at my school. The gender ratio of accepted students is much more balanced than the gender ratio of applicants. Every year, the admissions department fields complaints from upset male applicants who were rejected; they feel that they were done a disservice because "the bar was higher" for them than for the female applicants. They point to the different acceptance rates for men and women as proof of this "lower bar" for women. In reality, according to my school's admissions officers, the average female applicant is significantly stronger than the average male applicant. There exists, apparently, a huge volume of unqualified male applicants, who inflate that "80%" figure despite having no real chance at earning a position. We're talking SAT scores hundreds of points below the typical admitted student, no actual engineering experience, things like that. (I have heard that large companies like Texas Instruments also have this problem, which is why they place restrictions on which specific degrees applicants can have - to filter out that chaff.) These men remain in the applicant pool where women would've washed out, the admissions officers at my school hypothesize, because it is easier for women to "give up" on STEM fields at the first sign of trouble due to social / societal pressures. Incompetent men, however, can think they're good at STEM more or less forever. A more reasonable conclusion to draw, instead of "Facebook's male engineers are more skilled than their female engineers", would be the one that is presented in the article by the people who have the data. Namely, that this statistic arises from the confounding effect of seniority: Facebook's more senior engineers tend to be male, since the drive to hire more women has been more recent, and more senior engineers have code accepted more often.
- shados 9y ago
  You can still lower the bar below "hiring straight out of college in droves". Hiring more self taught and bootcamp people is often advocated as a way to increase diversity, and a lot of roles don't require a college degree (plus a lot of self taught and bootcamp folks are very good). However, on a large enough dataset, they will be weaker candidates. So if you use those sources to improve diversity, you'll end up with a correlation between diverse hires and more junior devs. Which screws up with every other metrics you'll look at.
  - douche 9y ago
    I'm not sure you're going to correct the perceived gender/racial/whatever imbalances if you start hiring self-taught programmers and bootcamp grads in droves, just looking at the typical demographics of the people that self-select into those cohorts.
    - shados 9y ago
      there's actually quite a few bootcamps and social programs to help minorities break into the field, actually.
- hamandcheese 9y ago
  If the bar is the same, but there are fewer female applicants than male applicants, then there will necessarily be fewer females accepted (assuming standards are applied equally). Until the number of women in our field are on par with men, efforts to create an artificial balance will mean lowering the bar.
autokad 9y ago
its even more troubling then that. When faced with stiffer ability to get interviews (let alone offers), we practice a ton more to increase our hard skills. more practice does tend to lead to being more proficient at something. my female friends generally got 5-10 interviews a week. me, not so much

by leshow 9y ago

jlebrech 9y ago

I was going to elaborate in my original post, but I like my upvotes.

jlebrech 9y ago

I like your non-bigoted explanation, I wouldn't have expressed it in such a way.

fahadkhan 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
  This assumes that a job opening has a perfect distribution of applicants. Let's take another hypothetical; Bob's factory posts machinist ads on Craigslist. CL turns out to send Bob 90% males and 10% females. Bob decides to try to increase the number of females he hires, and advertises on a second site. Turns out this site is viewed by a higher percentage of females, and thus his number of female applicants increases, and the bar for hiring stays the same.
- logandavis 9y ago
  > If we assume that group A and group B have the same average skill level This assumption, on which your argument rests, is invalid. I'm an engineering college student who's had conversations on this subject with admissions officers at my school. The gender ratio of accepted students is much more balanced than the gender ratio of applicants. Every year, the admissions department fields complaints from upset male applicants who were rejected; they feel that they were done a disservice because "the bar was higher" for them than for the female applicants. They point to the different acceptance rates for men and women as proof of this "lower bar" for women. In reality, according to my school's admissions officers, the average female applicant is significantly stronger than the average male applicant. There exists, apparently, a huge volume of unqualified male applicants, who inflate that "80%" figure despite having no real chance at earning a position. We're talking SAT scores hundreds of points below the typical admitted student, no actual engineering experience, things like that. (I have heard that large companies like Texas Instruments also have this problem, which is why they place restrictions on which specific degrees applicants can have - to filter out that chaff.) These men remain in the applicant pool where women would've washed out, the admissions officers at my school hypothesize, because it is easier for women to "give up" on STEM fields at the first sign of trouble due to social / societal pressures. Incompetent men, however, can think they're good at STEM more or less forever. A more reasonable conclusion to draw, instead of "Facebook's male engineers are more skilled than their female engineers", would be the one that is presented in the article by the people who have the data. Namely, that this statistic arises from the confounding effect of seniority: Facebook's more senior engineers tend to be male, since the drive to hire more women has been more recent, and more senior engineers have code accepted more often.
shados 9y ago
You can still lower the bar below "hiring straight out of college in droves". Hiring more self taught and bootcamp people is often advocated as a way to increase diversity, and a lot of roles don't require a college degree (plus a lot of self taught and bootcamp folks are very good). However, on a large enough dataset, they will be weaker candidates. So if you use those sources to improve diversity, you'll end up with a correlation between diverse hires and more junior devs. Which screws up with every other metrics you'll look at.
- douche 9y ago
  I'm not sure you're going to correct the perceived gender/racial/whatever imbalances if you start hiring self-taught programmers and bootcamp grads in droves, just looking at the typical demographics of the people that self-select into those cohorts.
  - shados 9y ago
    there's actually quite a few bootcamps and social programs to help minorities break into the field, actually.
hamandcheese 9y ago
If the bar is the same, but there are fewer female applicants than male applicants, then there will necessarily be fewer females accepted (assuming standards are applied equally). Until the number of women in our field are on par with men, efforts to create an artificial balance will mean lowering the bar.

autokad 9y ago

its even more troubling then that. When faced with stiffer ability to get interviews (let alone offers), we practice a ton more to increase our hard skills. more practice does tend to lead to being more proficient at something. my female friends generally got 5-10 interviews a week. me, not so much