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You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engi

You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative. Obviously my statement is not evidence either. I only wanted to point it out because this is so often overlooked when it comes to these issues. This is an arena where our cognitive biases are especially pernicious, and any discussion needs to address them.

ng12 9y ago
> you write him off as an idiot and forget him Not really. I have a lot of faith in our engineering staff so I wonder how he got hired and how he avoids getting fired. The uncomfortable truth is that if he was an employee that "looked good" I would know the answer to those questions.
- praestigiare 9y ago
  As I said before, my response is not data, I know that. But what you just wrote is exactly how confirmation bias works: If he fit your narrative, he would confirm your narrative. That is why these discussions need to be about data, and not "what everyone sees and no one talks about."
  - ng12 9y ago
    My point is more that the anecdotal stuff matters -- by being ham-fisted in your attempts to address diversity you reduce inclusiveness.
- richmarr 9y ago
  Your faith in your engineering staff is beside the point. Bias is human nature. Unless you're actively structuring your processes to exclude or minimise it then you're certainly suffering from it, the only question is how. It's not specifically gender or racial bias either. We ran a study of 700 candidates for a role, running regular hiring against blind assessment and found that the major difference for that role in that organisation was socio-economic... they'd been excluding great candidates who went to less prestigious universities.
nilkn 9y ago
It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence? Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningful. It sounds like the attitude of her manager towards the incompetent developer is actually the most significant point here: this incompetent developer is being retained and in fact praised by her manager for diversity despite the obvious issues. Does the manager treat incompetent male developers the same way? The implication of the post is clearly "no", but again selection bias is possible.
- dvanduzer 9y ago
  Yes. In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them. Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those employers hired were men.
  - nilkn 9y ago
    I meant for my question to be directed specifically towards the person making the claim about her specific coworkers at a specific company. This company has hiring practices that are not necessarily reflected across all of corporate America, and the claims being made are about those specific hiring practices and the effects that they have.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      From what little the OP has said about her company I am willing to take a wild guess that she does indeed work for a large coproration (lip service paid to diversity, incompetent people hired to demonstrate it)- where you can expect this sort of thing to be very common. I don't know about corporate America in particular, but corporate anything is a big pile of useless dipped in incompetent, where all the work is done by contractors who are also useless and incompetent. Because there is noone in the damn org that knows how to hire a competent techie in the first place. So for me the OP's experience is more simply explained by working for an organisation that doesn't know how to hire engineers, not anything to do with diversity drives.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 9y ago
>You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative. If you just base it on what you see, yes. But if you're partial to top brass interviews and conversations about getting this or that person to pad diversity, and of talk about overlooking skills since "we need more X", then no (of course that would still be partial knowledge of the overall state of the market).
saas_co_de 9y ago
This can definitely be the case. There are lots of sh--ty white male programmers working in the industry. I have met plenty of white men who have masters level CS education, have worked for Google and other top name companies, and can't produce a line of useful working code to save their lives. The reasons why corporations frequently hire people who don't actually produce anything are varied and complex, but it happens, a lot. If someone is incompetent and also happens to be from a minority group then everyone starts complaining about how they are a "diversity hire" but with incompetent white males they just shrug and go "that's the way it is." In other words, it is so common with white males that no one even notices.
- wpietri 9y ago
  And I'd add that there's evidence (and plenty of anecdote) that the men who most object to diversity are not so good at what they do. Which makes sense; they are the ones who have the most to lose from an increased talent pool. [1] Personally, I'd be very interested to see Damore's code. We already know that he lied about both a PhD and being a chess master. [2] I would not be shocked at all to find out that he's not good at programming. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0131613 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna... [2] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/18271/is-james-damore-a-fide-master https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/18271/is-james-dam...
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    From the complaint: "23. Damore was diligent and loyal, and received substantial praise for the quality of his work. Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance ratings, placing him in the top few percentile of Google employees. Throughout the course of his employment with Google, Damore received approximately eight performance bonuses, the most recent of which was approximately 20% of his annual salary. Damore also received stock bonuses from the Google amounting to approximately $150,000 per year. 24. Damore was never disciplined or suspended during his entire tenure at Google. 25. Based on Damore’s excellent work, Damore was promoted to Senior Software Engineer in or around January 2017—just eight months before his unlawful termination by Google."
collyw 9y ago
Googles hiring process has had books written on it. People study for it. When you see someone there that is incompetent you are going to ask why they got through. Diversity hire is one obvious possibility.

ng12 9y ago

> you write him off as an idiot and forget him Not really. I have a lot of faith in our engineering staff so I wonder how he got hired and how he avoids getting fired. The uncomfortable truth is that if he was an employee that "looked good" I would know the answer to those questions.

praestigiare 9y ago
As I said before, my response is not data, I know that. But what you just wrote is exactly how confirmation bias works: If he fit your narrative, he would confirm your narrative. That is why these discussions need to be about data, and not "what everyone sees and no one talks about."
- ng12 9y ago
  My point is more that the anecdotal stuff matters -- by being ham-fisted in your attempts to address diversity you reduce inclusiveness.
richmarr 9y ago
Your faith in your engineering staff is beside the point. Bias is human nature. Unless you're actively structuring your processes to exclude or minimise it then you're certainly suffering from it, the only question is how. It's not specifically gender or racial bias either. We ran a study of 700 candidates for a role, running regular hiring against blind assessment and found that the major difference for that role in that organisation was socio-economic... they'd been excluding great candidates who went to less prestigious universities.

nilkn 9y ago

It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence? Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningful. It sounds like the attitude of her manager towards the incompetent developer is actually the most significant point here: this incompetent developer is being retained and in fact praised by her manager for diversity despite the obvious issues. Does the manager treat incompetent male developers the same way? The implication of the post is clearly "no", but again selection bias is possible.

dvanduzer 9y ago
Yes. In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them. Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those employers hired were men.
- nilkn 9y ago
  I meant for my question to be directed specifically towards the person making the claim about her specific coworkers at a specific company. This company has hiring practices that are not necessarily reflected across all of corporate America, and the claims being made are about those specific hiring practices and the effects that they have.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    From what little the OP has said about her company I am willing to take a wild guess that she does indeed work for a large coproration (lip service paid to diversity, incompetent people hired to demonstrate it)- where you can expect this sort of thing to be very common. I don't know about corporate America in particular, but corporate anything is a big pile of useless dipped in incompetent, where all the work is done by contractors who are also useless and incompetent. Because there is noone in the damn org that knows how to hire a competent techie in the first place. So for me the OP's experience is more simply explained by working for an organisation that doesn't know how to hire engineers, not anything to do with diversity drives.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 9y ago

>You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative. If you just base it on what you see, yes. But if you're partial to top brass interviews and conversations about getting this or that person to pad diversity, and of talk about overlooking skills since "we need more X", then no (of course that would still be partial knowledge of the overall state of the market).

saas_co_de 9y ago

This can definitely be the case. There are lots of sh--ty white male programmers working in the industry. I have met plenty of white men who have masters level CS education, have worked for Google and other top name companies, and can't produce a line of useful working code to save their lives. The reasons why corporations frequently hire people who don't actually produce anything are varied and complex, but it happens, a lot. If someone is incompetent and also happens to be from a minority group then everyone starts complaining about how they are a "diversity hire" but with incompetent white males they just shrug and go "that's the way it is." In other words, it is so common with white males that no one even notices.

wpietri 9y ago
And I'd add that there's evidence (and plenty of anecdote) that the men who most object to diversity are not so good at what they do. Which makes sense; they are the ones who have the most to lose from an increased talent pool. [1] Personally, I'd be very interested to see Damore's code. We already know that he lied about both a PhD and being a chess master. [2] I would not be shocked at all to find out that he's not good at programming. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0131613 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna... [2] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/18271/is-james-damore-a-fide-master https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/18271/is-james-dam...
- gizmo686 9y ago
  From the complaint: "23. Damore was diligent and loyal, and received substantial praise for the quality of his work. Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance ratings, placing him in the top few percentile of Google employees. Throughout the course of his employment with Google, Damore received approximately eight performance bonuses, the most recent of which was approximately 20% of his annual salary. Damore also received stock bonuses from the Google amounting to approximately $150,000 per year. 24. Damore was never disciplined or suspended during his entire tenure at Google. 25. Based on Damore’s excellent work, Damore was promoted to Senior Software Engineer in or around January 2017—just eight months before his unlawful termination by Google."

collyw 9y ago

Googles hiring process has had books written on it. People study for it. When you see someone there that is incompetent you are going to ask why they got through. Diversity hire is one obvious possibility.