5 ms·

How? Edit: The parent post was edited. Are other employee evaluation schemes free of appearance of sexism (or actual sexism), or is it harder to see?

tptacek 9y ago
The edit wasn't necessary to support the first sentence. There are thousands of tech companies, large and small, and most of them monitor employee performance. Meanwhile: allegations of sexist bias in review processes are infrequent enough to be newsworthy. QED.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  A quick google immediately shows pages like this one [] which frets about sexism without including the words "stack" or "ranking." It has the usual citing of questionable concepts like implicit bias, or the Bloomberg article's "unconscious bias." What I would like to know is, suppose you need to make a system in a large organization in an attempt to lay off your 10% worst employees. It's pretty reasonable to expect sexist rankings, even made by non-sexists, and to also expect beliefs by individuals, wrongly held, that their personal low rank was the result of sexism. How do you determine whether an organization's ranking system is sexist, in which direction, and by how much? [] https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-reviews-are-reinforcing-gender-bias-5-steps-to-fight-against-it-performance-review https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-revie... Edit: By non-sexists, I mean, like, non-garbage people.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    You asked a simple, straightforward question with an easily obtainable answer, which I provided. I'm not interested in the new tangent you're trying to start here, sorry.
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      Yeah but your answer was so weak, talking about lawsuits that have made the news. I have also seen, personally for example, allegations of sexism regarding employee ratings that didn't turn into a news article about a lawsuit. That means you can't use notoriety of lawsuits to precede the use of "QED."
- linkregister 9y ago
  Translation: “I don’t see sexism so it isn’t a problem.” On a serious note, tech companies, large and small, have varying amounts of lawsuits and news coverage. I agree that stack ranking and other rating methods make illegal discrimination more likely. I do not agree with your assertion that unreported discrimination based off sex doesn’t occur.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    That is not the assertion I am making. You've also shifted the goalposts: you're talking about sexism in the workplace, which I agree is rampant in our industry, and I'm talking about performance review systems that are structurally or endemically biased against women, which obviously also exist, but pretty clearly don't exist everywhere.
    - linkregister 9y ago
      Sorry, I missed the distinction.
- kansface 9y ago
  You claim the correlation between companies with allegations of sexism in employee review (covered by the news), and companies that do stack ranking are sufficiently strong to declare a causal relationship between the two - in fact, strong enough that the former is universally a consequence of the later?
eridius 9y ago
If you rate employees using objective metrics, then you can avoid sexism. The problem with stack ranking is, as the article said, it forces managers to use subjective measurements to rank employees because they're forced to put the employees in a particular order (instead of saying two employees performed the same). Once you start using subjective measurements, it's almost impossible to avoid having biases creep in.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.
  - eridius 9y ago
    But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time, and are they producing code that's up to the quality standards of the team (which could be measured by tracking whether they're introducing new bugs).
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      You can do that, and it sounds like a good idea as a backstop for subjective evaluations, but if this metric becomes important to the process, then people fight over estimates and game the bug tracker.
    - gaius 9y ago
      But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time No you can't, unless you have a method for dividing a project up into blocks of exactly equal difficulty. The person who takes more time to do genuinely difficult things is probably closing fewer JIRAs than the one quickly cranking through easy ones, which would score more highly on that metric, but which is the more valuable to your organisation?

tptacek 9y ago

The edit wasn't necessary to support the first sentence. There are thousands of tech companies, large and small, and most of them monitor employee performance. Meanwhile: allegations of sexist bias in review processes are infrequent enough to be newsworthy. QED.

SamReidHughes 9y ago
A quick google immediately shows pages like this one [] which frets about sexism without including the words "stack" or "ranking." It has the usual citing of questionable concepts like implicit bias, or the Bloomberg article's "unconscious bias." What I would like to know is, suppose you need to make a system in a large organization in an attempt to lay off your 10% worst employees. It's pretty reasonable to expect sexist rankings, even made by non-sexists, and to also expect beliefs by individuals, wrongly held, that their personal low rank was the result of sexism. How do you determine whether an organization's ranking system is sexist, in which direction, and by how much? [] https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-reviews-are-reinforcing-gender-bias-5-steps-to-fight-against-it-performance-review https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-revie... Edit: By non-sexists, I mean, like, non-garbage people.
- tptacek 9y ago
  You asked a simple, straightforward question with an easily obtainable answer, which I provided. I'm not interested in the new tangent you're trying to start here, sorry.
  - SamReidHughes 9y ago
    Yeah but your answer was so weak, talking about lawsuits that have made the news. I have also seen, personally for example, allegations of sexism regarding employee ratings that didn't turn into a news article about a lawsuit. That means you can't use notoriety of lawsuits to precede the use of "QED."
linkregister 9y ago
Translation: “I don’t see sexism so it isn’t a problem.” On a serious note, tech companies, large and small, have varying amounts of lawsuits and news coverage. I agree that stack ranking and other rating methods make illegal discrimination more likely. I do not agree with your assertion that unreported discrimination based off sex doesn’t occur.
- tptacek 9y ago
  That is not the assertion I am making. You've also shifted the goalposts: you're talking about sexism in the workplace, which I agree is rampant in our industry, and I'm talking about performance review systems that are structurally or endemically biased against women, which obviously also exist, but pretty clearly don't exist everywhere.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    Sorry, I missed the distinction.
kansface 9y ago
You claim the correlation between companies with allegations of sexism in employee review (covered by the news), and companies that do stack ranking are sufficiently strong to declare a causal relationship between the two - in fact, strong enough that the former is universally a consequence of the later?

eridius 9y ago

If you rate employees using objective metrics, then you can avoid sexism. The problem with stack ranking is, as the article said, it forces managers to use subjective measurements to rank employees because they're forced to put the employees in a particular order (instead of saying two employees performed the same). Once you start using subjective measurements, it's almost impossible to avoid having biases creep in.

SamReidHughes 9y ago
The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.
- eridius 9y ago
  But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time, and are they producing code that's up to the quality standards of the team (which could be measured by tracking whether they're introducing new bugs).
  - SamReidHughes 9y ago
    You can do that, and it sounds like a good idea as a backstop for subjective evaluations, but if this metric becomes important to the process, then people fight over estimates and game the bug tracker.
  - gaius 9y ago
    But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time No you can't, unless you have a method for dividing a project up into blocks of exactly equal difficulty. The person who takes more time to do genuinely difficult things is probably closing fewer JIRAs than the one quickly cranking through easy ones, which would score more highly on that metric, but which is the more valuable to your organisation?