8 ms·

Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but: If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by e

• deepnotderp 7y ago
  If all/most employers exclude workers based on demographics, then smart employers will realize that they can find great employees in those demographics. A good portion of Quant trading is based off a similar principle. If I can model priors and variance better than my competitors, I can make money.
  • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    It isn’t that simple. In my local talent market, big FAANGs + Microsoft-style companies have been aggressively recruiting female SWEs, creating even starker imbalances in smaller tech companies + startups. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for those companies to completely give up on finding women to hire, because that supply is limited (at least until the educational pipeline catches up). And it kind of makes sense: it will take a few more years for supply in the industry to actually increase (especially for senior talent), while companies like Google are under the spotlight now and no one really cares about that 10 developer payroll company that Google poached talent from. (Not to mention employment laws work different for companies of different sizes) To put it in trading terms, if your bigger competitors are sucking up all the supply of X, then you simply don’t worry about buying X if you can get by with Y anyways.
• empath75 7y ago
  Your ROI calculation probably becomes different after you settle a massive EEOC lawsuit.
• cameronbrown 7y ago
  There's no reason the target-able category of "software engineer" can't include both genders (with representative ratios)
  • eloff 7y ago
    If you can target software engineer on Facebook, then clearly you'd just do that. If you're targeting more broadly for some stupid reason, then there's an economic incentive to target unfairly by demographic, just to narrow down the sheer number of irrelevant ad views by any means possible.
    • mirimir 7y ago
      I doubt that you could do that on Facebook. But on LinkedIn, you could obviously target people who claim experience in software engineering. As you say, that might well effectively select for younger men. And as far as I know, that wouldn't be illegal. But you can't target by age, gender or disability. Because it's explicitly illegal.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        Some percentage of people-who-can-write-code probably have that listed as their occupation on Facebook, so target them.
• dangus 7y ago
  “It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me. An analogy to your justification: the most cost efficient thing to do with hazardous chemicals is to dump them down the drain.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • eloff 7y ago
    Women software engineers are a much smaller percentage of women than male software engineers are of men. That's pretty obvious to anyone who's ever worked in software.
    • dangus 7y ago
      The wording was unclear to me at first because it wasn’t explicit. Anyway, I completely changed my comment to more closely go along with the point I want to be making. Regardless, besides being unfair the idea that the policy is economically justified doesn’t seem to be immediately intuitive to me. It seems like you should advertise on subject matter for that kind of thing, e.g. people who watch EEVBlog would get an advertisement for electrical engineering jobs.
      • marcosdumay 7y ago
        The wonders of target advertising. It's probably not possible to target the readers of CS and EE content, but targeting young men is easy.
    • qtplatypus 7y ago
      However that is in part because employers have been historically hesitant to employ them (and clearly if they are not advising to women then the will not be getting employment) this creates a self supporting feedback loop. Part of employment law is to break this loop.
      • 7y ago
• GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  > I shouldn't have the government mandating that I can't tune my advertising campaign for ROI, which is basically the only point of running one if the first place. Then find another country.... dipshit. In the United States this is illegal. I would say "sorry", but I am not. If you really hold this view, kill yourself.
  • dang 7y ago
    You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong another comment is. In addition to contributing to destroying this place, it discredits what you're saying—which if your position is correct, means that you discredit the truth. That's a bad thing to do to the truth. So please don't comment like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it unfortunately turns out the you've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly. As you know, we ban accounts for doing that. Would you mind just reviewing them and taking the spirit of the site to heart, so we don't have to ban you? It's not hard to use HN as intended if you want to.
    • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      Fair enough. I will refrain from said type of comments in the future. My apologies.
• joncrane 7y ago
  My Aunt wrote computer code into her 60s. This was up until at most 10 years ago. She has a degree in math and went back to school after being a SAHM and got a degree in computer science from a community college, and banged out code for about 15 years. She coded circles around (and out-adulted) her younger colleagues.
  • kop316 7y ago
    Good on her, and whenever I see/hear folks say that hiring younger workers is cheaper overall for a company, I very simply wonder if they have ever actually worked for a good experienced older worker. An older worker can get things done in an hour that can take younger workers a day (or even longer!), and thats not even including having someone come in and fix issues with the younger person's code. The older person can mentor younger people, and will ensure that the younger workforce will turn into better workers. On top of that you hit on the other thing, they are often more mature, have a better work life balance, and know what they want. This tends to mean less personnel issues, the person is much less likely to burn out, and the person will stay there longer. I would happily pay 3-4x for that more seasoned person for the quality work alone, but there are so many reasons to have older, more experienced people in your company.
  • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    Not sure why this is downvoted... but good for her.
  • megaremote 7y ago
    > She coded circles around (and out-adulted) her younger colleagues. How would you ever know this?
    • joncrane 7y ago
      She's not a boastful person and doesn't like talking about work, and we don't have much in common. But in an effort to bridge the gap, she would tell me about work. The few conversations we had about her job made me angry on her behalf for how much of the workload, and more importantly management responsibilities, she shouldered on behalf of the company for no increase in title or pay. It was a small, family owned company that made medical software that was a little "fly by the seat of the pants" if you get my drift. For the removal of doubt, I have worked as a computer programmer.
• blondin 7y ago
  > Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this ah! allow me to borrow this from time to time in the future :)
• bsder 7y ago
  > If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. I'll go the other way. I can tell you, specifically, that if I want embedded software engineers, generally older is better. It takes a lot of experience to wrangle software architecture, C, crappy development tools, communication stacks, PCB boards with bugs, microprocessor architectures, real-time operating systems, oscilloscope traces, Wireshark traces of CANBUS, etc. into a functional system I have yet to meet someone with less than 15 years of experience who can pull that off without me standing over their shoulder telling them what to do. Not everybody is building the exact same VC funded, fad driven, social malware website over and over and over. Some of us are doing real work.
  • kevindong 7y ago
    > Not everybody is building the exact same VC funded, fad driven, social malware website over and over and over. > Some of us are doing real work. The author undeniably had an inflammatory position. But is it really necessary to respond with yet another inflammatory position?
• jacques_chester 7y ago
  > statistically speaking Based on your own statistics, or someone else's? Or perhaps The Intl. Jnl. Of I Think I Read It Somewhere Once?
• braythwayt 7y ago
  If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. I think your logic is flawed. What you are not taking into account is that when you advertise, you ask people to do a certain amount of self-selection. If you advertise that you need a Go programmer, it's not like you have to work really hard to only advertise to Go programmers for fear that you will get 1,000,000 resumés from Java programmers. And even if you did, you can throw out all those resumés cheaply, because they don't have Go experience on them. The big costs in hiring are the cost of showing ads to people, or even the cost of sorting through resumés. The big costs of hiring are 1. Interviewing people, and 2. The opportunity cost of not finding the right person as soon as possible. Not advertising to women because you have a theory that there are fewer qualified women out of the entire population of women than there are qualified men out of the entire population of men is premature optimization. If, for example, you are advertising to Hacker News people, do you really think that the statistics about women in general are relevant? Or perhaps those women who read Hacker News are not representative of women in general? Same for if you advertise to people who have shown an interest in Go, or Elixir, or Lisp, or distributed system, or DevOps. If you were advertising for people with experience programming for space flight in 1971, there might have only been a dozen women in America with relevant experience. What kind of logic leads you to say, "Forget it, I am not interested in hearing from Margaret Hamilton, because there are so many women who actually have experience as secretaries?" I have said this many times before, but when you are seeking exceptional people, people who are actually very rarely available and have many opportunities to choose from, the overall statistics are irrelevant. If out of 10,000 people on Hacker News there are four men you would hire, and only one woman, this is no time too think, "my ads get four times the efficiency if I only advertise to men." Instead, you should be thinking, "There are only .05% of the readers that I want to hire. If I advertise to both men and women, I increase the chance of finding one of those .05% by a whopping 25%!" If hiring is easy, that may not matter. But if hiring is hard, if you might make several offers and only get one person to accept, if you might go a month before finding the ideal candidate... You want to advertise far and wide, and use other methods to filter out spammy submissions. Advertising is cheap. Not being able to hire the right person at that magical moment when they are available is very expensive.
• maxerickson 7y ago
  Is your assumption even particularly true? (your assertion is that ad views in some demographics will so outweigh useful impressions that it is worthwhile to exclude those demographics. But ad views don't cost much!)
• noobermin 7y ago
  This is why I bemoan the current form of identity politics because it allows an out. "I don't hate women, it's just disadvantageous to me to hire them," or, "I don't hate black people, I just won't rent to them because they statistically commit more crimes." And without an iota of malice in anyone's heart, relevant actors can reproduce the same exact disparities that perpetuate inequality. This is called systemic discrimination. I know the example you're offering is a step removed from that ("I want to tune my ads to maximize ROI, but if a woman sends me a resume and is a good fit, I won't discriminate") but the problem with disparities is no individual actor is incentivized to buck the trend, which assists in perpetuating it. That's at least the logic why the government steps in and changes the incentives and why such intervention is warranted.
  • rayiner 7y ago
    > And without an iota of malice in anyone's heart, relevant actors can reproduce the same exact disparities that perpetuate inequality. This is called systemic discrimination. That’s not systematic discrimination. It’s express discrimination and illegal. Systemic discrimination results from policies that are facially sex or race neutral, but have a discriminatory impact because of structural discrimination in society. (E.g. not hiring people for having marijuana convictions may be an instance of systemic discrimination if black people are convicted far more often for possession despite using drugs at similar rates to white people.)
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    > This is why I bemoan the current form of identity politics because it allows an out. "I don't hate women, it's just disadvantageous to me to hire them," or, "I don't hate black people, I just won't rent to them because they statistically commit more crimes." That's direct discrimination, and I don't see how “the current form of identity politics” supposedly creates an “out” for it. Please elaborate.
    • iikoolpp 7y ago
      It doesn't; it's just an irrelevant scapegoat.
• gnicholas 7y ago
  Why not just use CPC? That way you don't pay for views by anyone who isn't interested in the position.
• guelo 7y ago
  Not sure what your point is, there are a lot of things that would reduce business costs but are illegal.
• viraptor 7y ago
  > Not because they're less capable, but because there's less of them as a percentage of the population. I don't get it. FB which is the context here allows you to pay per click. Why would the ROI change if they're just as capable?
• ryan_j_naughton 7y ago
  If we examine Fair Credit and Reporting Act (FCRA), we see that it is not ok to discriminate against protected groups like race even if that means you're taking on more financial risk. Let's assume the data indicates that certain minorities are much more likely to default on a loan. You still cannot use their race to deny them a loan. The reason is that it would perpetuate inequality. Given that minorities were systemically discriminated against previously by red lining by the federal government and could not get a federally backed mortgage in for decades (which resulted in Urban ghettos, white flight, etc). And given that those injustices have not been properly corrected, discriminating based upon race must be forbidden in the credit markets. But you can discriminate using other variables. For example, you can discriminate based on education, income, credit history, credit score, etc. And some of those variables might correlate heavily with race. In that scenario, you can use FCRA compliant variables even if they correlate with race as those variables are (a) cleared by the government, (b) derived from actual facts about the individual (as opposed to predictions). Otherwise, if you in your underwriting machine learning model accidentally find a proxy variable for race that isn't an FCRA compliant variable, your compliance department will require you to not use that proxy variable in your underwriting model. Your argument "I'm taking on an extra financial burden" doesn't excuse you from ensuring fair access to credit. That's akin to saying "the cost of being handicap accessible is unfair to my business as it costs us money so I don't want to do it". We have made certain rules to ensure people have a fair shot in life and those inherently cause an increased cost to businesses. Now, there is actually more nuance to this. For example, if you provide a credit product but you only make that product available in certain zipcodes, you could actually run afoul of fair credit laws if the zipcodes you include versus exclude are heavily correlated with race. However, if you are a very small business and don't have the resources to provide your services in all markets / zipcodes, then you likely would be ok simply because having to provide your services in the many places might be an undue burden on the business. However, as you grow and become more financially stable, you would/night need to fix that.
• scarface74 7y ago
  It doesn’t matter if it is fair or not. It is specifically illegal to discriminate in advertising for housing and jobs.
• klyrs 7y ago
  By all accounts, chattel slavery was extremely cost effective. Is that all that matters?
• shkkmo 7y ago
  Your ROI will go way down when you get sued for breaking the law. There are also much better ways to target your ads (in ways that directly relate) to improve your ROI (like advertising on StackOverflow or HN). The negligible ROI improvements you get by discriminating are not worth the costs to society.
• eropple 7y ago
  > I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I'd probably choose ROI over fair. Understandable. And probably even common. That's why society should be adding disincentives--and that the people running most businesses do not suffer clawing panic attacks at the disincentivizing retribution appropriate for this behavior is indicative that we do not make businesses fear bad behavior nearly enough in this country. Nor, really, do we nearly often enough puncture the fictive-person boundary to reach the decision-makers themselves. I say this a lot around here and it never stops being true: society lets the corporation exist. There's a grant of power and a grant of trust inherent in a corporate charter and the advantages therein. Every member and executive of a corporation should fear the everloving daylights out of betraying that public trust. And yet at this point we almost take for granted that betraying the public trust is what corporations do.
• nql 7y ago
  The doctrine of disparate impact is plainly immoral and flies in the face of freedom of association. Society should punish companies which display behaviors they do not approve of using the market instead of the government.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    Were we to take the second sentence seriously, we would have to conclude that the general idea of prohibition of discrimination of whatever kind in non-governmental action (whether employment or public accommodation) was immoral, not merely the specific doctrine of disparate impact.
    • nql 7y ago
      I agree to the general idea that the government should try to do as little moral arbitration as possible. The concept of "separation of church and state" would be best modernized and secularized as the "separation of morality and state".