4 ms·

Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring

by Drew_ 7y ago

Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.

lucaspm98 7y ago
Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.
- lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
  This line of reasoning doesn't hold up. It's just as easy to flip your conclusion on it's head currently; any given member of a majority group could be viewed as only being hired because of internal biases, not merit. To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    There are no internal biases in favour of men in any organisation, anywhere. This is feminist propaganda - an assumption that if women dominate a field it's because they're good at it, but if men dominate it's because of innate sexism. Showing bias in favour of women is very easy: just quote the executive leadership saying things like "we want more women", cite pro-women policies or present one of many other pieces of hard evidence. No such evidence exists for a pro-male bias which is why this argument always ends up relying on logical fallacies and innuendo.
    - lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
      The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable. Like, jsut, do some basic math. If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender and compound the fact that people tend to not like working in environments where they feel tokenized, hiring women (or any unrepresented minority talent) is just good business sense, no moralizing required. Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]
      - thu2111 7y ago
        If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender Given the differences in the genders of who chooses to study the relevant qualifications, that's obviously a false assumption. The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable My comments are phrased in a level, factual manner. They're mostly retellings of things seen or experienced first hand, thus I am myself the source. But if you want sourced evidence of similar claims, by all means, go read the recruiter lawsuit against Google that was filed. It has plenty. Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims If you're going to assert a claim is false you need to pick something specific and show it's false, otherwise you're just blustering. And having direct experience of talking to women about this, I can tell you that many recognise the built-in advantage they have and are quite uncomfortable about it. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0] It's pretty ironic that you put citation number in square brackets and then don't actually provide one, given your moaning about unsourced claims. As for "essentially no women" you mean about 15-20%, which is far cry from essentially none. It's this sort of thing that justifies my claim of propaganda; it's normal for jobs to have unbalanced distributions of genders. Very few jobs have exactly equal proportions of men and women. For instance HR has a higher proportion of women than software has a proportion of men, but I don't see much talk of the terrible anti-male bias that must obviously pervade the HR industry. /s
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic. You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Many of those things have absolutely happened in the past at Google. I was told so directly by recruiters and had direct evidence of it myself e.g. I was one of the interviewers that one day started being allocated only female candidates; confirmed by recruiters to be an attempt to boost the numbers. I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well. Facebook experimented with much higher hiring bonuses for women for a while but I believe they stopped (this is in the public somewhere). The unfireable nature of female engineers there was rather well known, at least a couple of years ago. The last I heard on that was from a fairly senior manager who after a couple of whiskeys reported he knew of managers fighting to keep female transfers off their teams. Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour as just "not being a good fit for the team" and constantly moving them around. I had one on my team who was constantly lying to her teammates, as well as being a completely incompetent coder. For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Some people left the team specifically to get away from her. But, untouchable because the bosses boss was a feminist who thought this young woman with clear management ambitions was just wonderful. Result: she was rapidly promoted into management where she wanted to be, to the disbelief of her remaining teammates. Most Googlers were never really aware of these practices. Nonetheless, to believe Google is unbiased requires an incredible suspension of disbelief given the rather extreme publicly stated positions Pichai and the remaining senior management have taken, not to mention the Damore fiasco.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      > I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well I've heard lots of things from recruiters that were wrong. So much so that I generally advise people I know to check with be before believing anything a recruiter says. But because they lie on purpose, but because they're often misinformed. This goes for compensation, process, and policy questions where recruiter statements reliably break with policy and practice. So pardon me if I don't find recruiters to be a reliable source for hot corp goss. > Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour Sounds like innate sexism to me, given that the same thing happens with men. It's really hard to get fired. Ive had to deal with (men) not being fired for ages. > For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Depending on the language and background, this sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect a he java or frontend person to necessarily know hex. So yeah you're making my case for me. Sounds like bias against women.

by Drew_ 7y ago

lucaspm98 7y ago

Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.

lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
This line of reasoning doesn't hold up. It's just as easy to flip your conclusion on it's head currently; any given member of a majority group could be viewed as only being hired because of internal biases, not merit. To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.
- thu2111 7y ago
  There are no internal biases in favour of men in any organisation, anywhere. This is feminist propaganda - an assumption that if women dominate a field it's because they're good at it, but if men dominate it's because of innate sexism. Showing bias in favour of women is very easy: just quote the executive leadership saying things like "we want more women", cite pro-women policies or present one of many other pieces of hard evidence. No such evidence exists for a pro-male bias which is why this argument always ends up relying on logical fallacies and innuendo.
  - lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
    The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable. Like, jsut, do some basic math. If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender and compound the fact that people tend to not like working in environments where they feel tokenized, hiring women (or any unrepresented minority talent) is just good business sense, no moralizing required. Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]
    - thu2111 7y ago
      If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender Given the differences in the genders of who chooses to study the relevant qualifications, that's obviously a false assumption. The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable My comments are phrased in a level, factual manner. They're mostly retellings of things seen or experienced first hand, thus I am myself the source. But if you want sourced evidence of similar claims, by all means, go read the recruiter lawsuit against Google that was filed. It has plenty. Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims If you're going to assert a claim is false you need to pick something specific and show it's false, otherwise you're just blustering. And having direct experience of talking to women about this, I can tell you that many recognise the built-in advantage they have and are quite uncomfortable about it. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0] It's pretty ironic that you put citation number in square brackets and then don't actually provide one, given your moaning about unsourced claims. As for "essentially no women" you mean about 15-20%, which is far cry from essentially none. It's this sort of thing that justifies my claim of propaganda; it's normal for jobs to have unbalanced distributions of genders. Very few jobs have exactly equal proportions of men and women. For instance HR has a higher proportion of women than software has a proportion of men, but I don't see much talk of the terrible anti-male bias that must obviously pervade the HR industry. /s
joshuamorton 7y ago
Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic. You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Many of those things have absolutely happened in the past at Google. I was told so directly by recruiters and had direct evidence of it myself e.g. I was one of the interviewers that one day started being allocated only female candidates; confirmed by recruiters to be an attempt to boost the numbers. I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well. Facebook experimented with much higher hiring bonuses for women for a while but I believe they stopped (this is in the public somewhere). The unfireable nature of female engineers there was rather well known, at least a couple of years ago. The last I heard on that was from a fairly senior manager who after a couple of whiskeys reported he knew of managers fighting to keep female transfers off their teams. Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour as just "not being a good fit for the team" and constantly moving them around. I had one on my team who was constantly lying to her teammates, as well as being a completely incompetent coder. For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Some people left the team specifically to get away from her. But, untouchable because the bosses boss was a feminist who thought this young woman with clear management ambitions was just wonderful. Result: she was rapidly promoted into management where she wanted to be, to the disbelief of her remaining teammates. Most Googlers were never really aware of these practices. Nonetheless, to believe Google is unbiased requires an incredible suspension of disbelief given the rather extreme publicly stated positions Pichai and the remaining senior management have taken, not to mention the Damore fiasco.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well I've heard lots of things from recruiters that were wrong. So much so that I generally advise people I know to check with be before believing anything a recruiter says. But because they lie on purpose, but because they're often misinformed. This goes for compensation, process, and policy questions where recruiter statements reliably break with policy and practice. So pardon me if I don't find recruiters to be a reliable source for hot corp goss. > Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour Sounds like innate sexism to me, given that the same thing happens with men. It's really hard to get fired. Ive had to deal with (men) not being fired for ages. > For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Depending on the language and background, this sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect a he java or frontend person to necessarily know hex. So yeah you're making my case for me. Sounds like bias against women.