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Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to b

Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor. Honestly, I can imagine that being less troublesome even outside of attempting to be fair an equitable regardless of race / gender / sexual orientation.

amiga-workbench 8y ago
How do you quantify experience? It cannot be empirically measured in all the ways that it matters.
- VBprogrammer 8y ago
  Do you think even the most basic measure, say number of years, is any worse than the current process?
  - gambiting 8y ago
    Of course! Have you never met a programmer who had ~20 years of experience but actually was extremely weak at programming? Even the most basic of interviews would disqualify them from the job, but an ML algorithm can give them huge points on the "experience" alone.
    - VBprogrammer 8y ago
      I too have encountered developers with many years of experience and little programming skill. But in those cases I'd not hire them; or if they made it through the net I'd put them on a performance improvement plan and begin the process of firing them.
      - gambiting 8y ago
        I don't know where you live, but at least in EU the cost of hiring the wrong person is monstrous. Unless they were literally caught stealing and you can fire them for gross negligance, you are looking at months of "performance improvement plans", when both of you know that it won't actually improve anything. All while you are paying them full salary, national insurance, tax etc, and also sinking in the time of another employee who now has to deal with the situation. It's extremely critical to not hire those people in the first place, and I would not trust an algorithm to do that.
        VBprogrammer 8y ago
        Sorry, I guess we've got our wires crossed somewhere. I'm not suggesting that the hiring process be automated. Just that the compensation offered is fixed along a completely rigid structure.
  - amiga-workbench 8y ago
    I do, some people can do the same job for decades and somehow never improve their skills or personally develop. I'm not just interested in pure technical skills from somebody, I want somebody who has the common sense and risk aversion to keep their projects running steadily and effectively without needing to put out fires weekly. I also appreciate people who have something that I like to call "applied laziness", that being an aversion to repeating the same task over and over or building things that will require constant attention down the line. People with this skill are happy to put as much effort in as necessary in the short term to ensure that they don't have to expend needless effort in the future.
hueving 8y ago
The problem is that it can turn out men are more aggressive when it comes to getting counter offers which has a much larger impact than anything else. If that's the case then what do you propose, ban people from negotiating and lose everyone good enough to get competing offers?
- VBprogrammer 8y ago
  In short; yes. I think it's fair to say that google aren't going to run out of engineers if they implemented a completely rigid payment structure. Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry and secondly they attract the best engineers by reputation more than anything else.
  - graeme 8y ago
    What happens in a few years when the best engineers start leaving because they can negotiate higher pay elsewhere? If they start to get a reputation as merely good, but not the best, not where the exciting work happens?
    - VBprogrammer 8y ago
      That is one possible outcome. I'm not convinced it's the most likely outcome though. I guess it depends on how well correlated engineering talent is with negotiation skills. Personally I wouldn't imagine those things are well correlated at all. In my experience the best engineers have stayed around long after it was obvious that they could get considerably more by changing jobs (and sometimes changing back again). That aside, I think it would be entirely possible to set this up transparently enough that an engineer can see their future compensation and thus see how many years ahead they are jumping and can make their own judgement about whether it's worth moving to a company where their future compensation will likely change in the usual haphazard way.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry As evidenced by the lowball they just tossed me.
prepend 8y ago
I think this is part of the perception that machine learning is magical. This problem is as difficult as getting an accurate IQ. If you’re going to base pay- something really serious- on such an algorithm, it must be open and reproducible. Google is really good at this and that it doesn’t exist in a useful way is a signal that there is no algorithm. It would be extremely valuable to companies to know this like a credit score. I think when there are natural incentives, resources, and open problem it means that we don’t really have resources or doesn’t exist and needs more time and innovation to solve the problem.
- VBprogrammer 8y ago
  That's why I specifically excluded deep learning stuff. I was imagining something much simpler only marginally more complex than title base salary + x * years experience + y * years at google. Where the factors are initially chosen to get close to the current state.
  - falsedan 8y ago
    How about standardised bands for competency? E.g. a software engineer level 3 step 2 has mentored three people, been the tech lead/written the OKRs for a 6-month project, and has X years of experience on other projects (in the earlier levels)? Then it would be a simple HR policy to assign that engineer to whichever compensation band covered those levels when they joined a new company.
gambiting 8y ago
Blind hiring can have the exact opposite effect: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri... My point is - there's zero guarantee that a "logical" algorithm would be "fair". Just like if you trained an ML algorithm on the database of people currently in American prisons it would most likely conclude that black=more likely to be a criminal, which is obviously an unfair assumption to make.
- youwishboye 8y ago
  doesn't that mean that women have already artificially high wages? Genuinely curios
ryanmercer 8y ago
Amazon used software to try and hire people without discrimination, instead they unintentionally discriminated against women https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-built-ai-to-hire-people-discriminated-against-women-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-built-ai-to-hire-peop...
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor. You mean, the kind of thing basically every public sector employer has, where alleged gender pay gap is never an issue? Yes, of course that’s easy to do. OTOH, private sector employers like to have personal productivity be a factor, but don't have good objective metrics for that, so they let subjective assessment play a major role, such that the biases of managers become a substantial factor in setting pay.

amiga-workbench 8y ago

How do you quantify experience? It cannot be empirically measured in all the ways that it matters.

VBprogrammer 8y ago
Do you think even the most basic measure, say number of years, is any worse than the current process?
- gambiting 8y ago
  Of course! Have you never met a programmer who had ~20 years of experience but actually was extremely weak at programming? Even the most basic of interviews would disqualify them from the job, but an ML algorithm can give them huge points on the "experience" alone.
  - VBprogrammer 8y ago
    I too have encountered developers with many years of experience and little programming skill. But in those cases I'd not hire them; or if they made it through the net I'd put them on a performance improvement plan and begin the process of firing them.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      I don't know where you live, but at least in EU the cost of hiring the wrong person is monstrous. Unless they were literally caught stealing and you can fire them for gross negligance, you are looking at months of "performance improvement plans", when both of you know that it won't actually improve anything. All while you are paying them full salary, national insurance, tax etc, and also sinking in the time of another employee who now has to deal with the situation. It's extremely critical to not hire those people in the first place, and I would not trust an algorithm to do that.
      - VBprogrammer 8y ago
        Sorry, I guess we've got our wires crossed somewhere. I'm not suggesting that the hiring process be automated. Just that the compensation offered is fixed along a completely rigid structure.
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  I do, some people can do the same job for decades and somehow never improve their skills or personally develop. I'm not just interested in pure technical skills from somebody, I want somebody who has the common sense and risk aversion to keep their projects running steadily and effectively without needing to put out fires weekly. I also appreciate people who have something that I like to call "applied laziness", that being an aversion to repeating the same task over and over or building things that will require constant attention down the line. People with this skill are happy to put as much effort in as necessary in the short term to ensure that they don't have to expend needless effort in the future.

hueving 8y ago

The problem is that it can turn out men are more aggressive when it comes to getting counter offers which has a much larger impact than anything else. If that's the case then what do you propose, ban people from negotiating and lose everyone good enough to get competing offers?

VBprogrammer 8y ago
In short; yes. I think it's fair to say that google aren't going to run out of engineers if they implemented a completely rigid payment structure. Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry and secondly they attract the best engineers by reputation more than anything else.
- graeme 8y ago
  What happens in a few years when the best engineers start leaving because they can negotiate higher pay elsewhere? If they start to get a reputation as merely good, but not the best, not where the exciting work happens?
  - VBprogrammer 8y ago
    That is one possible outcome. I'm not convinced it's the most likely outcome though. I guess it depends on how well correlated engineering talent is with negotiation skills. Personally I wouldn't imagine those things are well correlated at all. In my experience the best engineers have stayed around long after it was obvious that they could get considerably more by changing jobs (and sometimes changing back again). That aside, I think it would be entirely possible to set this up transparently enough that an engineer can see their future compensation and thus see how many years ahead they are jumping and can make their own judgement about whether it's worth moving to a company where their future compensation will likely change in the usual haphazard way.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > Firstly, their pay is very high compared to the industry As evidenced by the lowball they just tossed me.

prepend 8y ago

I think this is part of the perception that machine learning is magical. This problem is as difficult as getting an accurate IQ. If you’re going to base pay- something really serious- on such an algorithm, it must be open and reproducible. Google is really good at this and that it doesn’t exist in a useful way is a signal that there is no algorithm. It would be extremely valuable to companies to know this like a credit score. I think when there are natural incentives, resources, and open problem it means that we don’t really have resources or doesn’t exist and needs more time and innovation to solve the problem.

VBprogrammer 8y ago
That's why I specifically excluded deep learning stuff. I was imagining something much simpler only marginally more complex than title base salary + x * years experience + y * years at google. Where the factors are initially chosen to get close to the current state.
- falsedan 8y ago
  How about standardised bands for competency? E.g. a software engineer level 3 step 2 has mentored three people, been the tech lead/written the OKRs for a 6-month project, and has X years of experience on other projects (in the earlier levels)? Then it would be a simple HR policy to assign that engineer to whichever compensation band covered those levels when they joined a new company.

gambiting 8y ago

Blind hiring can have the exact opposite effect: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri... My point is - there's zero guarantee that a "logical" algorithm would be "fair". Just like if you trained an ML algorithm on the database of people currently in American prisons it would most likely conclude that black=more likely to be a criminal, which is obviously an unfair assumption to make.

youwishboye 8y ago
doesn't that mean that women have already artificially high wages? Genuinely curios

ryanmercer 8y ago

Amazon used software to try and hire people without discrimination, instead they unintentionally discriminated against women https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-built-ai-to-hire-people-discriminated-against-women-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-built-ai-to-hire-peop...

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Wouldn't it be easier to create an algorithm for compensation which clearly didn't involve gender (i.e. no deep learning stuff). Something which boils down to base salary + experience factor + google service factor. You mean, the kind of thing basically every public sector employer has, where alleged gender pay gap is never an issue? Yes, of course that’s easy to do. OTOH, private sector employers like to have personal productivity be a factor, but don't have good objective metrics for that, so they let subjective assessment play a major role, such that the biases of managers become a substantial factor in setting pay.