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My point is that a lot of engineers get very annoyed when the topic of "sexism in Silicon Valley" is brought up, because anybody who is in a hiring position for

My point is that a lot of engineers get very annoyed when the topic of "sexism in Silicon Valley" is brought up, because anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is. For positions and treatment of individuals working in venture capital, however, I don't imagine very many engineers would have much to weigh in on. So what I'm getting at is that I'm pointing out how overloaded the concept of "Silicon Valley" is. Engineering and venture capital are two completely different worlds with the same title slapped on them, and it makes it very frustrating when communicating about things like this. I sympathize with Pao, but the title of the article is literally "This Is How Sexism Works in Silicon Valley."

bitwize 9y ago
No, it's not utilitarian. Cultural fit dominates as a hiring criterion in software dev, and "cultural fit" can be a proxy for racism, sexism, any sort of discrimination you can think of.
- ralusek 9y ago
  I can tell you that about 90% of candidates I speak to are male, about 80% are white, Eastern European, or South & East Asian. The demographics of the hiring pool are very much aligned with the demographics of the workforce. In terms of "cultural" fit, you're right. I do a lot of work with Hindu Indians and Muslim Pakistanis, because I have an enormous "cultural" overlap with them as a white male from Southern California. Oh, wait, I actually hired them because they were excellent engineers.
  - skj 9y ago
    None of what you said counters the comment you're replying to.
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    I think what people are saying is that they don't believe you when you say that hiring in IT is only utilitarian. You think you are being utilitarian, but instead you are leaning on your biases. In the same way the person in the article said that they hired women because there are some jobs they only feel comfortable giving to women. This is a utilitarian perspective -- women are better at X, I want X to be done well, I will give X to a woman. In the article this was described as "grunt work". Someone might think, "I need to hire an ivy league graduate to do the algorithms work" and feel they are being utilitarian. After all, there must be some value in the incredible price tag of that education. For me, that's still feeling a bit iffy, but much more reasonable. The more we discriminate, the more discrimination we embrace. At what point is discrimination good and at what point is it bad? There are clearly protected classes where we are not legally allowed to discriminate. There are classes where we can discriminate, but shouldn't. And there are classes where we must discriminate, otherwise we would just be hiring random people off the street. And even though I completely agree with everything you wrote, I think there is value in reflecting on what it means to be discriminatory and what focusing on utility might bring us. While I think it is very much beside the point of your post (which I thought was excellent), there is a bit of hubris to gloss over the issue of hiring for utility without examining how this is problematic. Before you ask -- a different model may be not to hire for utility, but rather to consider hiring as a responsibility you take on. Your responsibility is to help that person be successful. Are you able to do it it? That, in my experience, is a far better view than hiring for utility.
    - justadeveloper2 9y ago
      The problem I have with the allegation of "leaning on biases" is that it is impossible to disprove. You can never get out from under that allegation no matter how hard you try! NO ONE is without bias, no one is completely objective because we make decisions based on past experience and there's no way to create past experiences that are identical for everyone. I know from past traumas in my own life that I have heavy biases towards lots of things and I will never betray those because to do so is to deny how much pain was caused. That is life and it's time we grew up and got over it already.
      - mikekchar 9y ago
        I think the key is not to try to avoid biases (which sounds like strange advice, I admit). Discrimination is how to separate bad from good. Everyone also has preferences which help us select good (for us) results. We have experience which guides us to choices that have been successful in the past. All of that is bias -- it influences our choices and not all of it is bad. It isn't bias, per se, that is problematic. What creates difficulty are the consequences for poor choices. What we colloquially call "discrimination" is really someone being blind (or uncaring) to the results of their own poor judgement. All poor judgement is harmful, but there are some classes that we single out for special treatment in society. There are many examples in society where we make "allowances" based on discrimination. We might accept smaller women fire fighters than we do men. We might accept people from certain religions to wear slightly different uniforms. We might allow people with a physical impairment to have an aide for taking a test. By and large, these are choices that are meant to create good consequences, but they are discriminatory nonetheless. Indeed, it is societal bias which determines which allowances are considered to have good consequences and which are not (I expect that some people would question or reject one or two of my points, for example). Of course, not everyone is good at making judgements. Additionally we sometimes have cultural biases which encourage us to make certain poor judgements. It's important to realise that all poor judgement is harmful. Honestly, it doesn't matter if you make my life a misery because of my skin colour or because you don't like the way I talk. It doesn't even matter if you do it simply because you are unskillful and don't realise (or care) that you are doing it. But you can't make it illegal to be a jerk. Everybody would be in jail at one time in their life. Because there are some classes of problems that are pervasive in society, we can address the problem there. We can address specific problems with large classes of sufferers. The other potential benefit is that hopefully people will start to realise that their behaviour is undesirable. So if they think, "I can't use sexual innuendo as a way to politically lock out a female rival", they might start realising that politically locking out any rival is not really a beneficial strategy. I say might. I'm not really expecting that much, but one can live in hope ;-) Sorry for the book. I feel frustrated in the same way that I imagine you do. I just think that we need to help people steer away from the "thought crime" of bias and start getting them to focus on the "real crime" of harassment. If we complain too much about "bias" (or the allegation of bias), I think we risk people getting stuck on that point and never getting around to discussing how we learn to act better to each other.
humanrebar 9y ago
> ...anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is. Well, it attempts to be utilitarian. However, there are routinely articles on HN, from the perspective of the prospect and the company, about how much of a crapshoot interviewing for coding is.
- rsj_hn 9y ago
  Yes, it's a crapshoot. There can be bad hiring decisions. There can be bad business decisions. And people can be jerks or rude. People are passed over promotions. That happens all the time to everyone. But it's problematic when someone sees each event as happening to them as some conspiracy against their race/gender/age/whatever, as opposed to someone just disagreeing with them or dismissing their argument because they think it's a weak argument. And this is made worse because some people view everything through the lense of identity. It is literally the only developed conceptual framework they have. And when you try to explain, no, it was because I thought Y was better, then there must be unconscious bias, that you weren't even aware of. So fundamentally this debate is about the existence of an objective reality that does not have, at its base, gender or race or other attributes. Most of us who are engineers see a different base and it's pretty condescending to have someone explain to you that you prefer the person who aced the interview to the person who struggled because of some unconscious bias, or that you asked the wrong questions, etc. When I interview, I have a bank of questions and answers already written out. Each question has a well-defined definition of passing. I decide which question to ask based on the topics that the person lists on their resume. That is, question selection happens from reading the resume, and it happens before the interview. If they say they know javascript, I give them something from the JS pile. If they say they know crypto, I give them something from that pile. I don't want to ambush them with stuff they don't know. The assumption is that if they know the stuff they say they know well, then they can learn what they don't know as needed. And believe me, there are huge differences in how people do on these questions. For example, in the javascript test, I have some code with vulnerabilities that I ask them to find. I give them the code, explain what it does, explain what I want them to do, and either stay in the room or walk away, depending on what they want. After 20 min, I come back and ask them what they found. A large number of people find nothing. Some find one, but not the biggest one. Some find everything. Some are not able to understand how the code even works. This is for a security role. If they say they know crypto, then I have a bank of crypto questions. For example, I write down a common authentication and key establishment protocol. Then I ask them what could an attacker do if the last confirmation message was not sent. There are huge differences in outcomes. Some people are confused and have no idea. Others start confidently making stuff up. Others actually identify attacks that would be possible, demonstrating an understanding of cryptographic protocols. None of these differences are based on race, gender, age, etc. There isn't too much of a middle ground -- most people either succeed or fail. Now, they may have failed because they were having a bad day, or maybe they don't do well at technical interviews, or they might have lied on their resume, but there is an objective reality. This is what people mean when they say the interviews are utilitarian. But I honestly don't think that a large portion of the population is capable of understanding that. They really see everything in terms of identity, so the questions must have been sexist, or I was being unfair to the interviewee. Now the battle becomes, must everyone else also reject objective reality? Must everyone else throw away the notion of ranking candidates based on their ability to reason abstractly and demonstrate problem solving skills in a live interview, or must we just adopt a notion of "qualification" ? E.g. do we give everyone a job based on their GPA/list of degrees, or is there room for performance based evaluation of individuals? This debate is very important to tech, because there are a lot of incompetent engineers with degrees that really impact a team. There is a big difference in productivity between good engineers and bad engineers. Joel Spolsky is spot on here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid... In engineering, actual talent matters, and it matters a lot. This isn't like hiring a bus driver. You don't get promoted for having been there for X years, and you don't get hired based on your credentials. Your idea doesn't get adopted because "it's your turn" to have your way. Individual talent matters, and the fact that we may not always detect it accurately is not evidence of the hiring process not being utilitarian or any kind of identity-based discrimination.
enraged_camel 9y ago
Your entire position seems to be: Traditional barriers to entry, such as having a college degree, tend to be ignored in a small subset of programming jobs (notably Silicon Valley). Therefore, the hiring process in programming is more utilitarian than many other industries. Your talents and accomplishments matter the most in getting you hired. Therefore, sexism in tech is exaggerated.
morgtheborg 9y ago
> My point is that a lot of engineers get very annoyed when the topic of "sexism in Silicon Valley" is brought up, because anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is. To me, that shows a stunning lack of personal awareness. I've done hiring in tech. I'm an engineer. I'm also a woman. And I know I'm biased against certain groups. I purposefully offset that by making sure there is some sort of measurement (usually a coding exercise) with as objective as possible metrics for judgement (I explicitly state the criteria they'll be judged on so they're aware) that dictates whether they move on to the next stage or not. If I need to offset my subconscious biases as a woman in tech who spent many of her formative years living in different African countries, than I can only imagine the types of biases a white man who has lived primarily in the suburbs will need to be combatting. For such a man to be "annoyed" because "anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is" is a major part of the problem. You can't correct for biases (often subconscious or quite subtle) you're refusing to acknowledge.
- ralusek 9y ago
  Your example of how you offset your bias is by establishing an objective metric via a coding exercise. That is literally the most common practice... I have a series of technical questions that I ask a candidate specifically meant to isolate important technical abilities. Each of my questions almost obviously highlights one particular problem-solving ability that I expect from a quality engineer, and each question's answer is evaluated to ensure that that one specific criteria being met. The objectivity by which I evaluate this is subject, from your perspective, because I've alerted you that I'm a white male. However, you know literally nothing about me, the questions I ask, or my primary motive when seeking an employee. I am the director of engineering at my company, and it would be extremely detrimental to my own team if I were to pass up a quality candidate of any race or gender who fits my specific (and purely technical) criteria for a hire. Your response instead says that I demonstrate a stunning lack of personal awareness, even though not only do you not know anything about me, but I am actively engaging in a conversation about the topic for which I've clearly reflected heavily on. If you want to be less subjective (and quite frankly, racist and sexist) in your own evaluation of an individual you don't know, I suggest that you not make so many assumptions about a person upon discovering that they are a white male.
nodamage 9y ago
While it may be true that the hiring process in the tech industry is has a more utilitarian basis than in other industries, it is quite a jump to go from there to concluding that sexism in tech (at the "worker bee" level) is not a problem. Consider the high-profile stories of how women get treated in the industry after they are hired. https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describe... https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on... Even if we assume the hiring process is 100% utilitarian and unbiased (which itself is quite a questionable claim), the tech industry still has a serious problem with the way it treats women once they are hired. So attempting to argue that the problem comes from the venture capital side and not the engineering side comes across as a little naive.

bitwize 9y ago

No, it's not utilitarian. Cultural fit dominates as a hiring criterion in software dev, and "cultural fit" can be a proxy for racism, sexism, any sort of discrimination you can think of.

ralusek 9y ago
I can tell you that about 90% of candidates I speak to are male, about 80% are white, Eastern European, or South & East Asian. The demographics of the hiring pool are very much aligned with the demographics of the workforce. In terms of "cultural" fit, you're right. I do a lot of work with Hindu Indians and Muslim Pakistanis, because I have an enormous "cultural" overlap with them as a white male from Southern California. Oh, wait, I actually hired them because they were excellent engineers.
- skj 9y ago
  None of what you said counters the comment you're replying to.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  I think what people are saying is that they don't believe you when you say that hiring in IT is only utilitarian. You think you are being utilitarian, but instead you are leaning on your biases. In the same way the person in the article said that they hired women because there are some jobs they only feel comfortable giving to women. This is a utilitarian perspective -- women are better at X, I want X to be done well, I will give X to a woman. In the article this was described as "grunt work". Someone might think, "I need to hire an ivy league graduate to do the algorithms work" and feel they are being utilitarian. After all, there must be some value in the incredible price tag of that education. For me, that's still feeling a bit iffy, but much more reasonable. The more we discriminate, the more discrimination we embrace. At what point is discrimination good and at what point is it bad? There are clearly protected classes where we are not legally allowed to discriminate. There are classes where we can discriminate, but shouldn't. And there are classes where we must discriminate, otherwise we would just be hiring random people off the street. And even though I completely agree with everything you wrote, I think there is value in reflecting on what it means to be discriminatory and what focusing on utility might bring us. While I think it is very much beside the point of your post (which I thought was excellent), there is a bit of hubris to gloss over the issue of hiring for utility without examining how this is problematic. Before you ask -- a different model may be not to hire for utility, but rather to consider hiring as a responsibility you take on. Your responsibility is to help that person be successful. Are you able to do it it? That, in my experience, is a far better view than hiring for utility.
  - justadeveloper2 9y ago
    The problem I have with the allegation of "leaning on biases" is that it is impossible to disprove. You can never get out from under that allegation no matter how hard you try! NO ONE is without bias, no one is completely objective because we make decisions based on past experience and there's no way to create past experiences that are identical for everyone. I know from past traumas in my own life that I have heavy biases towards lots of things and I will never betray those because to do so is to deny how much pain was caused. That is life and it's time we grew up and got over it already.
    - mikekchar 9y ago
      I think the key is not to try to avoid biases (which sounds like strange advice, I admit). Discrimination is how to separate bad from good. Everyone also has preferences which help us select good (for us) results. We have experience which guides us to choices that have been successful in the past. All of that is bias -- it influences our choices and not all of it is bad. It isn't bias, per se, that is problematic. What creates difficulty are the consequences for poor choices. What we colloquially call "discrimination" is really someone being blind (or uncaring) to the results of their own poor judgement. All poor judgement is harmful, but there are some classes that we single out for special treatment in society. There are many examples in society where we make "allowances" based on discrimination. We might accept smaller women fire fighters than we do men. We might accept people from certain religions to wear slightly different uniforms. We might allow people with a physical impairment to have an aide for taking a test. By and large, these are choices that are meant to create good consequences, but they are discriminatory nonetheless. Indeed, it is societal bias which determines which allowances are considered to have good consequences and which are not (I expect that some people would question or reject one or two of my points, for example). Of course, not everyone is good at making judgements. Additionally we sometimes have cultural biases which encourage us to make certain poor judgements. It's important to realise that all poor judgement is harmful. Honestly, it doesn't matter if you make my life a misery because of my skin colour or because you don't like the way I talk. It doesn't even matter if you do it simply because you are unskillful and don't realise (or care) that you are doing it. But you can't make it illegal to be a jerk. Everybody would be in jail at one time in their life. Because there are some classes of problems that are pervasive in society, we can address the problem there. We can address specific problems with large classes of sufferers. The other potential benefit is that hopefully people will start to realise that their behaviour is undesirable. So if they think, "I can't use sexual innuendo as a way to politically lock out a female rival", they might start realising that politically locking out any rival is not really a beneficial strategy. I say might. I'm not really expecting that much, but one can live in hope ;-) Sorry for the book. I feel frustrated in the same way that I imagine you do. I just think that we need to help people steer away from the "thought crime" of bias and start getting them to focus on the "real crime" of harassment. If we complain too much about "bias" (or the allegation of bias), I think we risk people getting stuck on that point and never getting around to discussing how we learn to act better to each other.

humanrebar 9y ago

> ...anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is. Well, it attempts to be utilitarian. However, there are routinely articles on HN, from the perspective of the prospect and the company, about how much of a crapshoot interviewing for coding is.

rsj_hn 9y ago
Yes, it's a crapshoot. There can be bad hiring decisions. There can be bad business decisions. And people can be jerks or rude. People are passed over promotions. That happens all the time to everyone. But it's problematic when someone sees each event as happening to them as some conspiracy against their race/gender/age/whatever, as opposed to someone just disagreeing with them or dismissing their argument because they think it's a weak argument. And this is made worse because some people view everything through the lense of identity. It is literally the only developed conceptual framework they have. And when you try to explain, no, it was because I thought Y was better, then there must be unconscious bias, that you weren't even aware of. So fundamentally this debate is about the existence of an objective reality that does not have, at its base, gender or race or other attributes. Most of us who are engineers see a different base and it's pretty condescending to have someone explain to you that you prefer the person who aced the interview to the person who struggled because of some unconscious bias, or that you asked the wrong questions, etc. When I interview, I have a bank of questions and answers already written out. Each question has a well-defined definition of passing. I decide which question to ask based on the topics that the person lists on their resume. That is, question selection happens from reading the resume, and it happens before the interview. If they say they know javascript, I give them something from the JS pile. If they say they know crypto, I give them something from that pile. I don't want to ambush them with stuff they don't know. The assumption is that if they know the stuff they say they know well, then they can learn what they don't know as needed. And believe me, there are huge differences in how people do on these questions. For example, in the javascript test, I have some code with vulnerabilities that I ask them to find. I give them the code, explain what it does, explain what I want them to do, and either stay in the room or walk away, depending on what they want. After 20 min, I come back and ask them what they found. A large number of people find nothing. Some find one, but not the biggest one. Some find everything. Some are not able to understand how the code even works. This is for a security role. If they say they know crypto, then I have a bank of crypto questions. For example, I write down a common authentication and key establishment protocol. Then I ask them what could an attacker do if the last confirmation message was not sent. There are huge differences in outcomes. Some people are confused and have no idea. Others start confidently making stuff up. Others actually identify attacks that would be possible, demonstrating an understanding of cryptographic protocols. None of these differences are based on race, gender, age, etc. There isn't too much of a middle ground -- most people either succeed or fail. Now, they may have failed because they were having a bad day, or maybe they don't do well at technical interviews, or they might have lied on their resume, but there is an objective reality. This is what people mean when they say the interviews are utilitarian. But I honestly don't think that a large portion of the population is capable of understanding that. They really see everything in terms of identity, so the questions must have been sexist, or I was being unfair to the interviewee. Now the battle becomes, must everyone else also reject objective reality? Must everyone else throw away the notion of ranking candidates based on their ability to reason abstractly and demonstrate problem solving skills in a live interview, or must we just adopt a notion of "qualification" ? E.g. do we give everyone a job based on their GPA/list of degrees, or is there room for performance based evaluation of individuals? This debate is very important to tech, because there are a lot of incompetent engineers with degrees that really impact a team. There is a big difference in productivity between good engineers and bad engineers. Joel Spolsky is spot on here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid... In engineering, actual talent matters, and it matters a lot. This isn't like hiring a bus driver. You don't get promoted for having been there for X years, and you don't get hired based on your credentials. Your idea doesn't get adopted because "it's your turn" to have your way. Individual talent matters, and the fact that we may not always detect it accurately is not evidence of the hiring process not being utilitarian or any kind of identity-based discrimination.

enraged_camel 9y ago

Your entire position seems to be: Traditional barriers to entry, such as having a college degree, tend to be ignored in a small subset of programming jobs (notably Silicon Valley). Therefore, the hiring process in programming is more utilitarian than many other industries. Your talents and accomplishments matter the most in getting you hired. Therefore, sexism in tech is exaggerated.

morgtheborg 9y ago

> My point is that a lot of engineers get very annoyed when the topic of "sexism in Silicon Valley" is brought up, because anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is. To me, that shows a stunning lack of personal awareness. I've done hiring in tech. I'm an engineer. I'm also a woman. And I know I'm biased against certain groups. I purposefully offset that by making sure there is some sort of measurement (usually a coding exercise) with as objective as possible metrics for judgement (I explicitly state the criteria they'll be judged on so they're aware) that dictates whether they move on to the next stage or not. If I need to offset my subconscious biases as a woman in tech who spent many of her formative years living in different African countries, than I can only imagine the types of biases a white man who has lived primarily in the suburbs will need to be combatting. For such a man to be "annoyed" because "anybody who is in a hiring position for specifically engineering knows exactly how utilitarian the hiring process is" is a major part of the problem. You can't correct for biases (often subconscious or quite subtle) you're refusing to acknowledge.

ralusek 9y ago
Your example of how you offset your bias is by establishing an objective metric via a coding exercise. That is literally the most common practice... I have a series of technical questions that I ask a candidate specifically meant to isolate important technical abilities. Each of my questions almost obviously highlights one particular problem-solving ability that I expect from a quality engineer, and each question's answer is evaluated to ensure that that one specific criteria being met. The objectivity by which I evaluate this is subject, from your perspective, because I've alerted you that I'm a white male. However, you know literally nothing about me, the questions I ask, or my primary motive when seeking an employee. I am the director of engineering at my company, and it would be extremely detrimental to my own team if I were to pass up a quality candidate of any race or gender who fits my specific (and purely technical) criteria for a hire. Your response instead says that I demonstrate a stunning lack of personal awareness, even though not only do you not know anything about me, but I am actively engaging in a conversation about the topic for which I've clearly reflected heavily on. If you want to be less subjective (and quite frankly, racist and sexist) in your own evaluation of an individual you don't know, I suggest that you not make so many assumptions about a person upon discovering that they are a white male.

nodamage 9y ago

While it may be true that the hiring process in the tech industry is has a more utilitarian basis than in other industries, it is quite a jump to go from there to concluding that sexism in tech (at the "worker bee" level) is not a problem. Consider the high-profile stories of how women get treated in the industry after they are hired. https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describe... https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on... Even if we assume the hiring process is 100% utilitarian and unbiased (which itself is quite a questionable claim), the tech industry still has a serious problem with the way it treats women once they are hired. So attempting to argue that the problem comes from the venture capital side and not the engineering side comes across as a little naive.