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> One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions No. If you go down that path, then you are implying that women do in fact perform

> One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions No. If you go down that path, then you are implying that women do in fact perform worse at CS-related questions. That's a much bigger can of worms than the bias being implicated here.

guitarbill 8y ago
Hopefully we can at least agree that those questions are limited in effectiveness, and often have no actual relation to how good an engineer is. It varies of course. Sometimes, they seem more like a secret handshake you need to memorize to get into the boys club than actually useful engineering. Who hasn't had to revise some of these before applying for a job 3 years out of college? What it does do is effectively exclude applicants who didn't study CS, or who haven't heard of and memorized "cracking the coding interview". Assuming `fake CS questions == good engineer` is a huge mistake, but one i keep getting downvoted for everytime i mention it. Most rebuttals are usually something like "it's the best system we have", something i find unsatisfying.
- arandr0x 8y ago
  There is an interesting tangent in this thread where we can wonder what it would reveal if "coding interview" type CS tests were administered along with standard IQ tests (or the application included SAT scores). Do coding tests predict work performance better or worse than an IQ test? If worse, are they merely "culture fit" bias filters meant to retain the ingroup? If better, is it because culture fit actually matters, or because there is in fact some CS-specific skill or set of assumed knowledge that matters in programming that goes beyond logic? While I understand that using IQ tests as hiring predictors is itself a problem, I'm interested in the interplay in predictive ability between the two classes of tests. I think everyone would agree that any primarily intellectual timed test that was _less_ salient to work performance than an IQ test should be binned. What would happen to our interviews then?
  - sol_remmy 8y ago
    Using an IQ test in order to hire is actually illegal. If only the laws were that simple..
Greed 8y ago
It may imply this on a long enough timescale, but as it stands it only implies more that there is a historically larger pool of capable female employees sans CS degrees than there are candidates with. Which is demonstrably true.

guitarbill 8y ago

Hopefully we can at least agree that those questions are limited in effectiveness, and often have no actual relation to how good an engineer is. It varies of course. Sometimes, they seem more like a secret handshake you need to memorize to get into the boys club than actually useful engineering. Who hasn't had to revise some of these before applying for a job 3 years out of college? What it does do is effectively exclude applicants who didn't study CS, or who haven't heard of and memorized "cracking the coding interview". Assuming `fake CS questions == good engineer` is a huge mistake, but one i keep getting downvoted for everytime i mention it. Most rebuttals are usually something like "it's the best system we have", something i find unsatisfying.

arandr0x 8y ago
There is an interesting tangent in this thread where we can wonder what it would reveal if "coding interview" type CS tests were administered along with standard IQ tests (or the application included SAT scores). Do coding tests predict work performance better or worse than an IQ test? If worse, are they merely "culture fit" bias filters meant to retain the ingroup? If better, is it because culture fit actually matters, or because there is in fact some CS-specific skill or set of assumed knowledge that matters in programming that goes beyond logic? While I understand that using IQ tests as hiring predictors is itself a problem, I'm interested in the interplay in predictive ability between the two classes of tests. I think everyone would agree that any primarily intellectual timed test that was _less_ salient to work performance than an IQ test should be binned. What would happen to our interviews then?
- sol_remmy 8y ago
  Using an IQ test in order to hire is actually illegal. If only the laws were that simple..

Greed 8y ago

It may imply this on a long enough timescale, but as it stands it only implies more that there is a historically larger pool of capable female employees sans CS degrees than there are candidates with. Which is demonstrably true.