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Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

• 908B64B197 6y ago
  > I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical challenges. That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it. When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other ones. Are they there because of skills? Could be, could also be HR wanting to push diversity? Also possible. Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech recruiters that's tied to a bonus. So at every "diverse" hire you encounter you have to ask yourself: are they here because of skills or because someone was one hire short of cashing out their bonus?
  • eqvinox 6y ago
    ... which is exactly why the post points out the need for the applicant to be informed about affirmative action being applied. If you know how much AA was applied, you can actually make a better argument when you're mistreated. [for the people downvoting: I'm just pointing out what the article says.]
    • stefan_ 6y ago
      You are asking the companies to divulge that hiring you was a crass violation of labor laws? That doesn't seem a likely course of action.
    • 908B64B197 6y ago
      Sure. Company wide email: "Careful with these demographics: make sure to re-interview them before joining your team, they might not have had a proper technical screen." The lawsuit would be hilarious.
      • Cullinet 6y ago
        as someone who would make a diversity hire myself I am aghast at how this situation isn't taken as a opportunity to show the fools who hired me how utterly wrongly they've judged me. this reads like it's creating the very conditions for not achieving that, born out by the litany of positions held too briefly for making anything out of them at all.
      • tharne 6y ago
        These conversations already happen, they just tend to be more subtle. "So and so has made tremendous progress over the last several months, and I think with a little more support and guidance they could really excel...".
  • lambda_obrien 6y ago
    You don't have to ask yourself that, you can just accept that the people who you work with will usually be out of your control and respect their skills separately from what they look like. If they suck, then they suck, but don't prejudge because you think diversity hiring is rampant everywhere, which it is not.
    • musingsole 6y ago
      > who you work with will usually be out of your control and respect their skills Unless you're in a small company with a substantial ownership stake, not only should you accept the reality of this but also accept that dealing with it is part of your job. Making the best of the team and resources available is part of the job description. If given the reins of the hiring process, a given developer could not do a better job filling out company's a roster. The company has made decisions. Unless you were consulted on those decisions, your opinions aren't desired. Most of the time, your helping of those decisions' consequences will be inline with your responsibility for them: nil (scapegoating happens and shit rolls downhill, but I'd argue both are necessarily rare).
      • lambda_obrien 6y ago
        I guess not everyone agrees, since my comment was demolished.
        • musingsole 6y ago
          Upvotes and downvotes are two sides to the same coin of passion! I'm used to my stricter "it's your job" comments getting downvotes. I always assume because they come off as hyper-conservative, bootstraps type language. In this case, I think it's funny because the same mentality results in a more kumbaya attitude in the workplace (it's not my job to pick my coworkers. Whatever their faults, it is my job to succeed anyway). It's the type of thing I'd expect to be a bit of a upvote magnet...but I suppose hating on crappy coworkers trumps warmfuzzies in the HN crowd.
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    Recruiters don’t make the final decisions on hiring. The bonuses incentivize them or seek out diverse clients, not to lower standards. And your whole argument is, unfortunately, the standard-issue objection to any efforts to change an unfair system by, just to rub it in, once again blaming its victims. Why don’t you ever suspect that young white guy to just have the job bececause their father knows the CXO from golf? Did that sysadmin use to room with the tech lead in colleges? Empirically, such employment biographies are far more common than your hypotheticals. Gut somehow, they do not seem to provoke this righteous anger of meritocracy.
    • OptionX 6y ago
      If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right. By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.
      • jakelazaroff 6y ago
        People always say "two wrongs don't make a right" and then make no effort to correct the first wrong that happens to benefit them.
        • OptionX 6y ago
          Never had anything given to me by any connection in my family. Heck, my family dosen't even have any connections I could profit off if I wanted to. Now, it does annoy me having had to jump-backwards through the modern interviews for tech position and now there are people like the author who get handed the same kind of jobs solely based on the genitalia the were born with and still complains about it. So save your dollar store philosophy and stop making judgments about my reasons.
        • tharne 6y ago
          You're making the assumption that all wrongs can be corrected or made right, and that's often not true. We want to believe that everything can be magically fixed if we just come up with a clever enough solution. But many things don't work that way, and can't be made right, even if someone wants to do so. For example if you best friend sleeps with your spouse, you can forgive everyone, you can get divorced, you can move on, but there's no "making the wrong right".
  • metajack 6y ago
    > Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech recruiters that's tied to a bonus. It makes sense if you want to increase diversity to have the beginning of the funnel get lots of diverse candidates in. The recruiter is not a decision maker in most places, so the hiring bar is not necessarily affected by whether the recruiter got more diversity candidates into the funnel or not. As an example, in my experience there were not a lot of female candidate resumes coming in via normal channels. If the recruiter wants a bonus for increasing gender diversity, they are doing extra work to go and find female candidates and convincing them to apply. That is probably exactly what you want to be happening.
    • darioush 6y ago
      > Some places ... yeah you mean all (~ most) places :)
  • aqme28 6y ago
    > there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other ones. Wow this is not at all correct based on my experience. It is so common for "non-diverse individuals" to have gotten where they are based on things like network that I really don't think you can tell just by looking at someone. The worst developers I have worked with are often traditional "non-diverse" candidates.
    • higerordermap 6y ago
      > The worst developers I have worked with are often traditional "non-diverse" candidates. That's generally in proportion to the ratios in the workspace itself, nothing surprising statistically. Now ask yourself who are best developers you have ever worked with. Even that is probably non-diverse ones.
  • asdff 6y ago
    That's one take. Another take is that people want chums at work. An average person hires someone they see themselves as being friends with rather than the best qualified candidate. Animals such as bees, monkeys, and ourselves are also biased to favor their genetic group (kin selection). In other words, you subconsciously favor people who look like you and act like you. In that light, the non diverse office might be seen as less productive. Maybe this is a bunch of pals goofing off, rather than people hired to do work? But the whole point of the diversity hire isn't that you get someone who isn't white and that's it. The idea is that for every job, there are thousands of people who are qualified to do it, and among those, there are certainly people from all sorts of walks of life, and you'd spend earnest effort overcoming your subconscious biases by dipping your hand into the pool of equally skilled candidates, and pulling out the one that this overtly white dominated society we live in has held down since forever.
    • darkwater 6y ago
      Thanks for saying and explaining what diversity hiring actually is. Much needed and much appreciated.
    • Fellshard 6y ago
      So the whole thing is based off of false premises; good to know.
    • thu2111 6y ago
      It sure would be easier to build software firms if every job got thousands of qualified applicants. Obviously, that isn't the case.
      • asdff 6y ago
        That has more to do with the lack of marketing of the job opening than a lack of qualified talent out there
        • setr 6y ago
          I think more generally the issue is being swamped with unqualified talent, such that it's difficult to identify actual talent amongst the mess. A lot of people are not trying to be good at what they do, they're just trying to be paid for what they do.
  • lrem 6y ago
    You can always do affirmative action like Google. Invite the minorities to boot camps, coaching and mentoring programmes and so on... But subject them to the regular interview process and hiring bar.
    • munchbunny 6y ago
      > Invite the minorities to boot camps, coaching and mentoring programmes and so on... But subject them to the regular interview process and hiring bar. That's not affirmative action. That's like giving free SAT prep to disadvantaged minorities. Affirmative action is further down the line, moving the bar for test/interview results to hit targets. Which is not to say Google doesn't do it, just that the programs you're describing aren't it.
    • thu2111 6y ago
      Even when I was there years ago, it was common knowledge amongst those of us who did hiring that women had an easier time in the interview process. For example, females could not fail the first phone screens. They would always be forwarded to on-site interviews regardless of earlier performance. The justification was that weak performance at the initial screens would be taken into account later by the hiring committee, however men were given no such second chances.
      • 908B64B197 6y ago
        > however men were given no such second chances. That is, of course, if your resume doesn't get tossed out for not being diverse enough [0][1] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi... [1] https://www.wired.com/story/new-lawsuit-exposes-googles-desperation-to-improve-diversity/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-lawsuit-exposes-googles-desp...
      • jrnichols 6y ago
        This was my experience at a tech company in the Silicon Valley about 15 years ago. Women who applied were put at the top of the stack and guaranteed an in-person interview, over all other candidates. Even if they absolutely bombed the phone screening. We did end up having one potential candidate, but she was making a huge amount at her previous job and would not 'settle' for what was our sysadmin pay scale at the time. (I can't remember the exact numbers, but she was demanding at least 50% more than the top end of our pay scale.)
  • washadjeffmad 6y ago
    We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded auditions. Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent. During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than historically comprised their body, but they were from everywhere. It turns out musicians didn't want to be reduced to bigoted demographics, so it attracted many more "non-traditional" candidates when word spread you could make it on merit. Blind auditions were scrapped when he left, and so did actual diversity. You can include everyone today in a single introduction by mentioning Yale, Juilliard, Paris Conservatory, Royal Academy, etc. Merit destroys class privilege, which is a big faux pas when your patrons tend to be family of people who want to advance their careers in your institution. Just recently, I couldn't help but notice the timing of the creation of another superfluous position being filled by a fledgling choral director and a $MM donation by his parents to expand the performance hall he'll be using. Mere dutiful patronage, surely, in these times of austerity.
    • vlod 6y ago
      I've read about this before (some fancy orchestra, not sure if it's the same one as you've mentioned) and I went to one of those "Let's get more X in technology" speeches. They had some crazy complicated ways to solve this (not Occam's Razor thinking). I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and suggested blind tests for tech recruiting. i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to subconsciously discriminate and pass their resume to the hiring team. Not perfect, but it gives X at least a better shot. I was pretty much told it would never work and there were better ways and dismissed with a wave of a hand. So why don't we do these somewhat blind tests?
      • ip26 6y ago
        Some recent-ish research (I can't remember enough keywords to find it right now) has found that doing this actually hurts women's success rate a couple percentage points.
      • 6y ago
  • bsder 6y ago
    So why isn't some company or founder dipping into this underutilized labor pool and blowing everybody's doors off? That's a real question, and I don't have a good answer.
    • jfengel 6y ago
      Because that underutilized labor pool is also pretty green. It's hard to build a product with smart, talented developers who haven't spent a bunch of years learning the ecosystem. There's really no good substitute for the apprenticeship young devs get by being exposed to best practices, senior developers who can cut through problems that they've seen before, configure work flows, etc. That apprenticeship is expensive. It takes a lot of handholding. Not because they're not smart, but just because there's a vast amount of information that's hard to write down. It's a million little factoids, and they're easy to Google ... once you already know that they're there. It's not impossible to build a company with one really good senior dev and a bunch of fresh-outs. But that's made one level more complicated when you've got a diversity of cultures in the room, and the hiring process ends up coming down to "Well, that guy just seemed like a better fit". So the excluded ones give up, and the process perpetuates. I'm oversimplifying like crazy, and every real situation is different. But startups don't have the money or time to do better, and established companies just keep repeating their situations because that's what got them there. Some day somebody may figure out how to change that... and they're almost certainly going to get run through the wringer on HN accusing them of being affirmative-action SJW wokeness virtue-signallers. Which just makes it one step harder, and when they fail (as most new things do) it will further cement for people that Those People just can't code.
      • bsder 6y ago
        > It's hard to build a product with smart, talented developers who haven't spent a bunch of years learning the ecosystem. And, yet, YC funds these kinds of companies all the time. So why isn't YC tapping that pool? > But that's made one level more complicated when you've got a diversity of cultures in the room I don't buy that. Tech happily on a daily basis deals with people who can barely speak the same language.
  • tharne 6y ago
    I've seen this plenty of times. I even heard one manager at a happy hour say, "Thank god I finally hired an ABC and an XYZ, I can finally start recruiting based on talent again". This may be an extreme example, but still. Unfortunately when you have affirmative action or hiring quotas, you inadvertently to create a culture where the diverse individuals are seen as less skilled and less qualified even when many of them would have gotten to the same place without the quotas.
• muglug 6y ago
  Here's another anecdote about how female engineers are sometimes used to "balance" their team: https://twitter.com/SeaRyanC/status/1367191778386829312 https://twitter.com/SeaRyanC/status/1367191778386829312
  • foogazi 6y ago
    Unfortunate, BUT how many engineers/people are placed on teams they have no interest in?
• pluc 6y ago
  You can be hired for the perspectives you've obtained due to your experience, but god forbid you're hired for the perspective you can provide with your experience as a certain gender.
• maxehmookau 6y ago
  Firing someone for a "lack of chemistry" and refusing to give details is a Grade A dick move.
  • pmiller2 6y ago
    Is it any better or worse than "Sorry, it's just not working out?" I've seen this happen a few times.
  • DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    IANAL, but I think the general perception is that by giving reasons, one exposes the employer to additional risk of a lawsuit. So IIUC, the legal system carries some of the blame here.
  • wyldfire 6y ago
    And maybe a recipe for a lawsuit here in the US. The only female developer? It looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck.
  • kemiller2002 6y ago
    Honestly, not really. It sucks, but from a risk management perspective, less information given out is always better. Was she fired for legit reasons? Who knows. There is no advantage to the employer to give reasons. You can't really blame anyone for trying not to be sued.
    • steve_g 6y ago
      I'd say the dick move is firing someone without any kind of coaching or explanation about what you'd like to see done differently. The coaching should have happened well in advance of the firing. A firing that comes as a complete surprise to the employee is generally a sign of a bad manager (not always, but true enough to be a useful heuristic).
      • Can_Not 6y ago
        I guess there could be some improvements, such as a right to feedback law (protections for both parties), make it harder to legally fire someone but easier if it's a real democratic team decision, better short term unemployment benefits.
• vladletter 6y ago
  I'm sorry you had to go through all of this. As myself being part of a minority, I can only tell you that I do my best to fight for minorities and women first in this IT env that can be rough. Keep faith cause I've worked in different companies where everyone was really accepted and celebrated. Thank you for writing this article: hopefully, straight IT men will hear us and fight too.
  • pmarreck 6y ago
    I don't think the poster of this article is the author
    • vladletter 6y ago
      Oops thanks you right. Nvm.
  • einszwei 6y ago
    Genuine question: Have you read the article? The article is just as much for those who are trying to help women and minorities as it is for those who are biased.
    • vladletter 6y ago
      1) Yes 2) Yes agreed. I just hope the people that are biased read this article more than the people who already helping, that's it.
• tester756 6y ago
  >I have never considered that “having chemistry with the team” could be a reason for being let go. That's what worries me too. I like to throw a racist jokes, especially about my own nation from time to time and I guess I'd have hard time in corpos and companies like faang because polacks tend to lack of thick skin /s
  • tolbish 6y ago
    Generally one should read the room before opening the barn door of ethnic jokes.
    • cobraetor 6y ago
      In other words, it is all about social skills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAe867evM18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAe867evM18
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • ojnabieoot 6y ago
    Racist “jokes” make people uncomfortable because it’s directly adjacent to racist insults, racist hiring/firing practices, and even racist violence. Employers have a duty to workers from employees that are potential threats, and to remove employees that are walking legal liabilities. And that very much includes employees who claim to be “equal-opportunity offenders.” I understand that it’s more complicated when you are making jokes about your own ethnic group. But please understand that it’s not an issue of “bad culture fit.” As an example, employees who make relentless personal criticisms of their coworkers aren’t gruff people that have trouble fitting in to an upright corporate culture: they are jerks whose behavior rightfully makes them difficult to work with and hard to justify hiring. It is the same with making ethnic / racist jokes in the office. Just don’t do it. (There is also a difference between ethnic jokes about Poles and racist jokes about black people or Jews, but that’s a different discussion. Both are really not appropriate for the office.)
    • 6y ago
• raven105x 6y ago
  Times like these make it critical to discern between those of a certain gender vs those without talent (or discipline, or perhaps both). This is difficult to do without unfairly discounting the cases where people with talent still encounter unfair discrimination ...but this isn't it. There are plenty of female developers / engineers who have their colleagues' respect. They would also never find out they are diversity hires. If you are simply bad at your job, but also [protected status here], it's suddenly somehow newsworthy - I never liked this part of our culture.
• balkonpflanze 6y ago
  I don't have many female colleges. The ones I work with, I like them. They are in avg more social. But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman because " what happens when she gets pregnant" and we did hire her because she was good and I stood up for her. I should not need do so this! I think we would be better if with have more woman in our teams.
  • metajack 6y ago
    > But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman because " what happens when she gets pregnant" This is perhaps an example where extending parental leave benefits to both parents solves both ends of the problem. Men also may leave if they choose to expand their family, and women aren't pressured into more child care than they prefer due to the men not having parental leave to help. > They are in avg more social Careful with these generalizations. Women get placed in impossible behavioral expectations. Told to be more assertive, but then perceived differently than men when they are.
• IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Oh, come on! Dozens of threads and thousands of comments for the weekly Dr. Seuss pearl-clutching. But mentioning that, on occasion, tech orgs are shitty to women is immediately flagged? Whose the snowflake that can’t take any criticism and wants to stop others from seeing it here?
  • wyldfire 6y ago
    It's frustrating that we can't vouch for it, either.
    • pmiller2 6y ago
      Yeah, I'd like to know exactly why that is.
      • dang 6y ago
        Vouch links appear when a post is [dead]. There are degrees of [flagged] and [flagged][dead] is only the last of them.
        • em-bee 6y ago
          it would be nice to be able to vouch for flagged a post before it is dead, to prevent it from dying in the first place.
  • skinkestek 6y ago
    Dr. Seuss threads were also interesting. But yes, why was this flagged? It is an extremely important topic and this was a an unusual and valuable approach to it. Pure tech discussions are better on lobste.rs anyway so I recommend those who are allergic to this kind of topics to seek refugee there. (Or on second thought, maybe not. I don't want deletionist and flag abusers there either.)
  • dang 6y ago
    Please don't post like this—it does nothing to help, and you're just stoking a flamewar, guaranteed to get dumber and nastier as it gets going, with this flamebait and name-calling. The way to help is to let us know. We don't come close to seeing everything. The way to let us know is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines say. Fortunately another user followed them and did so. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• hypocrisy 6y ago
  > This is an example of how methods to empower women, when wrongly applied, can have the opposite effect, making them feel even more insecure and powerless. The soft bigotry of low expectations and affirmative action rears its ugly head yet again. Hire people of all races, genders and creeds based on _merit_, not diversity quotas. No one should have to show up to work feeling like a second class citizen and that they're only there because of their sex or the color of their skin.
  • ViViDboarder 6y ago
    Just a note that it’s useful to think about what merit criteria you have and what really matters for your job. There’s a lot of room for biases to sneak in under the guise of an objective measure. For example, looking for only people who graduated from a certain tier of school limits you by adopting whatever discriminatory practices that those schools have adopted. Or looking for people with a particular experience that is rarely afforded to a particular class of people. Instead, by working identify the merits that actually result in high performance and then working to evaluate those in an interview can get you better and more diverse employees.
• tester756 6y ago
  >“Carl is a difficult person to work with. But I trust in you to accomplish this. You will use your feminine approach and you’ll be fine.” What's wrong with feminine approach? People use this kind of wording especially when it comes to design - e.g room, or outfit, generally those things that are considered as a areas where women are way better, so? >That social networks can involve as much technology as any video game and that actually Facebook was one of the most influential tech companies of the last ten years? How's that relevant? People don't learn coding during Facebooking, unlike games where it's way more probable.
  • tfigueroa 6y ago
    What does “the feminine approach” mean? How is she supposed to employ “it”? What if a manager advised to use “manly ruggedness” to fix an algorithm from O(n^2) to O(n)? It employ “Irish Luck”?
    • tester756 6y ago
      Ok, I get this, thank you.
    • throwawayyy1986 6y ago
      Nah I think this is fair game...how much have we been told that Jacinda is better at handling a pandemic because she's a woman? The default position nowadays is that women/trans people/etc. are exactly the same as men but magically better.
  • em-bee 6y ago
    what's wrong is that the implied expectation that she would automatically be successful because she is a woman. the boss was probably thinking that she should let her feminine charm work on him or something like that. "you will use your whatever skill and you will be fine" is quite patronizing. i would have stated the situation without making assumptions about her ability to do this, especially not any assumptions tied to her gender. i would have explained that she was the only person on the team who doesn't already have a bad relationship with carl. i would have asked her if she wants to do this and give her the option to decline. and maybe even offered a bonus for taking on a difficult task. and at the same time i would have pushed to have carl fired because he clearly isn't getting along with anyone else.
• pmiller2 6y ago
  Tech certainly does have a diversity problem, by which I mean lack of diversity actually works to the detriment of tech companies. Yes, from the POV of companies who are hiring, this is largely a pipeline problem. No, tech companies aren't going to solve this problem directly themselves. But, what tech companies can do is change their candidate sourcing practices. I'm in favor of some version of the Rooney Rule [0] in tech hiring. Roughly, you should make sure to interview at least one person from an underrepresented group each time there's a position to fill. Given the pipeline problem, I'd cap it at some arbitrary number of candidates per opening -- one large enough to ensure that the company made an effort to seek out candidates who would add diversity to the company, but small enough that you can still actually hire. You'd have to validate that recruiters were actually contacting people from underrepresented groups to make sure you're not just getting to a point where every position ended with "Welp, we tried, but the only people we could find to interview for the position were these N white and Asian guys," but it could certainly work. The beauty of this approach is that you don't lower your hiring bar. You just make sure to get people from underrepresented groups in front of your interviewers and hire them if they're the most qualified people for the job. Now, I get that big companies don't hire for 1 position at a time, so, the point here would be to have your pool of candidates interviewing always contain a certain number of people from underrepresented groups. This is explicitly not a hiring quota, because you don't lower your bar. It's just putting an opportunity in front of more people to see if you can get people who look different from your standard straight, cisgender, white or Asian male tech worker into your recruiting pipeline to begin with. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
  • theluketaylor 6y ago
    I saw an interview with one of the late night hosts (I think it was Seth Meyers). He told a story about building the staff for their show as part of the launch. They asked the various talent agencies for packets for writers (which are collections of sketches and other material tv comedy writers use to get hired. Think artist portfolio). The show wanted to hire a more diverse writing staff and asked for that in packet submissions. They only got a handful packets from women out of hundreds of options. The show went back and said they would only look at packets from women. Suddenly packets came from all over and the show found a number of great female writers. It was a really interesting conversation because to get a diversity of outcomes they had to completely change their approach, not just sprinkle some diversity into their existing process. Applied to the rooney rule from above it would involve cultivating multiple inputs to the talent pipeline to make sure interesting candidates don't get blocked along the way. NFL positions like head coach have a pretty limited pool of candidates to begin with, so ensuring an interview quota is likely sufficient. For something like software developer the pool is so much deeper and wider and interview quota on its own is unlikely to be sufficient.
• rsweeney21 6y ago
  I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They followed up with several phone calls encouraging me to attend. I didn't want to go because I felt like the only reason they wanted to talk to me was so they could add another number to their diversity report. My Dad convinced me to go. They had Native American speakers, food, performances and music. It felt so condescending. On day 2 they had hiring managers from dozens of departments. It was like speed dating. One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." It felt gross. One hiring manager handed me an offer letter when I sat down. She hadn't even spoken a word to me. She told me she had reviewed my resume and that was enough. WTF. I got several offers from that event. I turned them all down. I ended up getting a job at Microsoft. They didn't ask me about my race when I applied.
  • tonystubblebine 6y ago
    The reaction you had resonated with me in that it's the feeling I most want to avoid giving someone else. I'm a white male hiring manager who is often incorporating explicit diversity/inclusion strategies into work. It's tricky--like tap dancing around all the ways that the work can go wrong. And this is one I overindex for. I never want someone to think they are a token. IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity & inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun culture, belief that it will make the company more money. I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the business by helping the business make better decisions, helps find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those things boil down to: it's good for business. This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an employee that you only care about their ability to help the business make money. But there's also something really unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the business cares about an employee's happiness and positive social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the employment in the first place, which is making money. I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less competition from other recruiters." That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true, especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage that allows you to take advantage of industry bias. Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much opportunity. It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we think you could out perform your past work by a lot."
• pmarreck 6y ago
  I read the whole thing and I feel for her, especially around all the gendered language she has had to deal with, but had some thoughts. I want to make constructive criticisms (which is extremely difficult in the context of someone perceiving harm), but I'd prefer not to get downvoted, so I will try to be as empathetic as possible when stating the following. > I have a strong opinion about diversity hires: Although I don’t think they are a perfect solution, I consider them an effective measure to break the ceiling glass that excludes minorities from certain roles. > Was I only selected because I was the only female applicant? Would I have passed the technical assessment? Would I keep moving up the company hierarchy only because I had a minority pass? Did they think that I wouldn’t mind knowing my own recruitment criteria? These things are exactly why some people are against this way of increasing diversity. Critics of forced diversity hiring see this as a direct and obvious (at least to them) consequence of this practice; her experiencing the result is rather unsurprising (her surprise, however, is). She also does not suggest a better solution, so this just seems like whining (the definition of which is "complaining about a situation without a known solution"). I'd suggest that she probably wasn't informed that she was a diversity hire because intuitively, people know this is a shameful practice without great consequences... > I have never considered that “having chemistry with the team” could be a reason for being let go. Guess what? After a quick Google search about “cultural fitting in tech,” I discovered that is an argument often used by tech companies to disguise a discriminatory preference. She links to an example of this, but the example is just another person pulling the racism card when the only example that person gave was not drinking after work with coworkers. You can't expect people to not see you as a diversity hire, but only when it is convenient for you... if you want them to not see you as one when hiring you, but if when letting go of you for some given reason, you want to jump to conclusions based on diversity... you're gonna need much better evidence than that. "Cultural fit" is unfortunately a very valid condition for hire, at least if the goal is productivity and happiness: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-workplace-10380.html https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-wor... The fact that "lack of cultural fit" SEEMS TO sometimes fall along diversity lines, is not so much a problem with diversity hiring as it is a problem of people just hanging out too much with other people who seem more like them, something that is (unfortunately) a natural inclination and something that literally every one of us should be consciously fighting. But it's a subpar situation, for sure.
• obelos 6y ago
  Make that five times...
• RulingWalnut 6y ago
  Very much not challenging the experiences in this post but I will say: “I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn.” was most likely speaking to her youth than her femininity. Source: Myself as someone who has given advice to a lot of different interns/new grads along the same exact lines.
  • koyote 6y ago
    I almost stopped reading there. That sentence, no matter how I try to interpret it, seems like very common and genuine advice to a new graduate starter.
    • tclancy 6y ago
      Why stop reading there? No one is right all the time and the author is probably younger than you. But her experience is also different from yours. It would be good not to assume they are wrong simply because you think they misunderstood something.
      • koyote 6y ago
        > Why stop reading there? I said 'almost'. If you started reading a blog post on a topic and the very first example in the opening paragraph is a clear misinterpretation then it is quite natural to assume that the rest of the post will follow that trend. That's all part of critical thinking and the automatic assessment of trustworthiness any human being will engage when reading/listening to someone's ideas/opinions/experiences. I gave the article the benefit of the doubt and continued reading; the rest of the post illustrates clear discrimination experiences so I am glad I continued reading.
    • lostcolony 6y ago
      It might be! He -might- say it to every intern on their first day. But the problem with many statements or questions that land poorly, even ones not tied to race, gender, etc, is not the intention of the person saying them, but the experience of the person hearing them. For instance, "are you supposed to be here?" may be a perfectly reasonable question asked purely because the asker doesn't recognize the person, and they would have asked it regardless of skin color, gender, etc. However, if you've heard things like that all your life, if your lived experience is that the majority don't expect someone of your gender or skin color to be in the exclusive areas they frequent, it can't help but hurt, and feel exclusive based on your gender, skin color, etc. You can't help but wonder "would they have asked that of me if I was a white man?", etc. This doesn't mean the question asker meant anything by the question, but it does indicate a lack of sensitivity to the lived experience of the person here. You can compensate for it by learning about and recognizing that lived experience and reformulating the question; for instance "Hi! I don't think we've met; what do you do here?" for my example, or "Welcome aboard! I'm really excited to see what you accomplish here. My goal is to make sure this is a really positive experience for you, and my hope is that you'll be able to learn a lot while you're with us" for the original.
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  It's a pretty straightforward deadlock: "We want to hire you because you'll add diversity." vs. "I don't want to be hired just because I'll add diversity." Since the solution of giving preference based on diverse attributes creates a deadlock, the problem has been framed wrong. I'm not going to posit the right framing... I'm actually not sure. But letting people know they are doing the job for reasons other than their capability means they'll forever feel less qualified than their colleagues.
  • SavantIdiot 6y ago
    Taking a non-diverse population and making it diverse is not easy at first. You need to jumpstart the effort across the board. Example: if there are no minority engineers applying from schools, it is because there are no minority students getting degrees. Follow that back to the source. It also is a lot to ask of a non-diverse group to suddenly understand diversity: they really can't, you need the group to be diverse in the first place so that those opinions are baked-in to the system. It's a catch-22, and bootstrapping is gonna upset the status quo (and probably newcomers) until things are running smoothly. One source: With engineering it can be followed back to opportunity at school. The US school funding model sucks: wealthy districts get the most money, which means better education, which means students come out primed for better jobs. Then there's the Gatekeeping common in engineering that tries to keep out others (in the late 80's it was harassing women so that they dropped out... one of the frats at my uni had an actual game to try to get women to drop out by making fun of them in recitation, which was horrific).
    • rwcarlsen 6y ago
      More egalitarian funding will just make the wealthier classes just put their money and students somewhere else. I live in an area with a lot of private and charter schools. This is the mechanism that the community members have evolved to fund+support their children's education directly the way they want. If you try to make people pay for something they don't want to - they'll just find ways around it and you could even be left with even worse outcomes than before.
• rachelbythebay 6y ago
  Upside of being a token X: sometimes you get enough cash out of it to be able to leave it behind again. This only works if they get to trot you out. So get used to that bridle. Downside of being a token X: normally they just keep you around long enough to tick off the "hiring" box(es), since nobody gives a shit about retention, and you probably won't be the one chosen to get put on a pedestal. So yeah, keep trying until you can find a place where you can just do your work and be taken seriously and not have them treat you like a piece of meat or worse. Good luck. I'm still looking for that place.
• serjester 6y ago
  With all due respect, I think part of her issue is she looks at everything from a "sexism" lens. Her first discriminatory comment seems like a sensible thing to tell any new grad. She complains that the company didn't tell her she was a diversity hire? Doing this seems like a recipe for any diversity hire to always have imposter syndrome. There's definitely sexism in the tech industry but I'd argue the best way forward is with tact. Coming out guns blaring with accusations and always assuming bad intentions will just alienate people from the cause. She'd be better served trying to understand where people are coming from and working through specific, addressable issues.
  • grayhatter 6y ago
    she looks at everything from a sexism lense?... in the essay's topic of sexism she experienced? Yeah, agreed, she's too narrowly focused on her topic... She should ramble more and include more unrelated observations.
    • azinman2 6y ago
      It seems like she’s experienced a lot of inappropriate and difficult things explicitly about gender. My only question was the cultural fit — we don’t know for sure that gender had anything to do with it. Often times when people are fired not only can you never tell them why, they are incapable of seeing, assessing, and recognizing their own flaws (particular when it comes to personal interaction versus quantitative measurements).
      • handoflixue 6y ago
        "Culture fit" without any other explanation is fairly solid evidence. First off, programming is one of the most "culture agnostic" jobs I've worked - if you're a high performer, you can absolutely get away with being an abrasive asshole. At least, if you're male. That's slowly changing, but I still find the social skills of the average programmer to be significantly below what I'd expect from, say, a minimum wage cashier or call center employee. (And that's fine, but it makes "culture fit" look like a much more suspicious excuse) The other aspect here is that they just fired her, without any effort to actually work on that "culture fit". I've worked with managers who had wildly different styles, and some of them did NOT like mine. But instead of getting fired, I had conversations with them. It's certainly possible that she's lying, or in denial, or just plain wrong. But I'd say the weight of the evidence favors her.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• DC1350 6y ago
  > The time I was asked to use my “female approach” This stuff is why a lot of diversity recruiting makes no sense to me. There are lots of good arguments in favour of targeting under represented groups (social justice, discovering talented people who get missed with traditional methods, willing to accept lower wages, less likely to unionize, etc) but the idea that women or Black people are useful because they “think differently” just seems offensive.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• coldtea 6y ago
  Two things some people have difficulty differentiating between: - Being discriminated or insulted for being X vs: - Made fun or insulted with reference to X Not getting a job, a promotion, or even simply heard by your colleagues because you're X is discrimination. Being treated worse because of X is discrimination. Being called anti-X slurs by people considering X being inferior is racism. But being insulted or made fun of with reference to your X status might not be discrimination at all. Might just be an angry colleague or a colleague making a joke, and it might happen from each to every other member of the team. E.g. if someone makes fun of an fellow British or German's or Texan's dev's accent, the team can just laught it off. Such jokes happen (or used to happen before fast-track-cancelling became a thing) all the time between young devs in teams. But if the same is done with the same intent, but the person is e.g. Indian or Asian or Latino, many (especially outside the team or people new to one) make it all about racism and discrimination. There's this idea that people must be 100% "professional", non joking, always zen-calm, all the time. That is, dry and passive aggresive.
  • jeofken 6y ago
    Males joke with cruelty to test each other. We do in every culture. If you are not strong and team focused enough to laugh it off and banter, you are not trustworthy to carry your load for the group.
    • coldtea 6y ago
      Exactly. And they will use whatever attribute they think of.
  • chickenbane 6y ago
    > There's this idea that people must be 100% "professional", non joking, always zen-calm, all the time. That is, dry and passive aggresive. This idea is likely held by people who have not had a lifetime of discrimination and insults and made fun of for X. When you have been such a victim, being in a professional, zen-calm work environment is a luxury, and honestly not too much to ask for.
  • jberryman 6y ago
• ibudiallo 6y ago
  I wrote about my experience as a black developer not too long ago [1]. At first, you are shocked when you hear some insensitive comments made around you. Then you realize no one else even notices, so it must be something wrong with you. Eventually you ignore it. When someone says something stupid, you rationalize it and move on. After all, you are only just here to do a job. But then you get angry. You are angry at everything. No one understand why you are angry or why you blow things out of proportion. "Hey Carl didn't mean to offend you. It was just that one time." What they don't understand is that you've been hearing the same stupid jokes or comments for 15 years in your career. In June of last summer, multiple companies contacted me to help them do something about diversity in their company. Here is what every company is excited to do: Diversity day, minority day, rainbow flag day, Awareness, BLM profile image, hashtags. Here is what was incredibly hard to do: Hiring more black people. I interviewed hundreds of black people on their behalf, many highly qualified for the jobs. Not more than a 10 candidates got a reply for a follow up. So far I only know of one who was hired. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53180073 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53180073
  • arenaninja 6y ago
    I'm in a similar boat, story time! $current_company runs internal events and makes noise about leadership bonuses being tied to diversity targets. I'm part of $targeted_minority so I usually show to the relevant zoom meetings. There's recurring meetings but no actionable items emerge from these meetings. In a way I'm alright with this because some people need the meetings as a coping mechanism but it doesn't fix the underlying problem; bringing in more $targeted_minority does that. What's missing: data about internal hiring/promotions/referrals showing whether $targeted_minority has a funnel problem. Maybe those reports are above my pay grade at this company. For some anecdata I've made over 30 referrals and not one has been hired. At $previous_company I made 6 referrals that turned into 4 offers and 3 hires (and one of those referrals walked away before being made an offer). Sure, $current_company has higher standards but I'm a bit incredulous at the success rate gap. Maybe one day they will give up and pad the numbers with marketing/HR folk, etc. and pat themselves on the back. Maybe they already do that and I just don't know about it.
    • 6y ago
• robbmorganf 6y ago
  A lot of really insightful and disturbing stories in the comments here about discrimination in hiring. To bring them all together and improve, what hiring practices have you observed that have really worked well? (Particularly interested in responses from often-marginalized individuals)
• bollocks187 6y ago
  People react to many different things that are said or done to them. Many people use 'discrimination' as the cause. I will give you one example many hi-tech company's in the USA hire a people of the same heritage or culture - is that discrimination. If you say yes then many white people should put a class action lawsuit against all the non-white companies operating in silicon valley.
  • EvilEy3 6y ago
    > If you say yes then many white people should put a class action lawsuit against all the non-white companies operating in silicon valley. It only works if you're PoC, sweaty.
• kroolik 6y ago
  I've always been afraid of having to lower the hiring bar due to diversity quotas. Thankfully, I have always had the chance to focus on the particular skill set, instead. The ideas about ensuring big enough sampling from diverse sources during sourcing sounds like a good solution, without having to lower your hiring bar. What sparks my curiosity, though, is out of 3 companies the original poster has written about, the second time she knew she is a diversity hire. Yet, this time it doesn't matter at all, because she was excited about the opportunity. It strikes me, because it suddenly wasn't a problem once it aligned with the original poster. If we stand up to some idea, shouldn't we live up to it every time? If you hate being a diversity hire, why would you accept it once it suits you?
  • cole-k 6y ago
    I think you just misread what her objection was to the first point. Quoting from 1., > I didn’t know what to think. I have a strong opinion about diversity hires: Although I don’t think they are a perfect solution, I consider them an effective measure to break the ceiling glass that excludes minorities from certain roles. But I always thought that if it ever happened to me, it would be a transparent process and I would have the opportunity to accept the conditions deliberately. It was at least implied upfront that she was a diversity hire for 2. And maybe I just don't have as strong a moral compass as you, but I have found it difficult to always uphold the ideas I stand for. E.g. I like the idea of solely merit-based hiring. But if I got a dream job because I knew the CEO's friend and they put in a good word for me, I would have a hard time rejecting that offer.
    • kroolik 6y ago
      I think I might simply be biased based on my experience. Haven't changed jobs often enough to use any of my friend's referrals. But none of them were my dream job, either. Might, in fact, change my PoV when an opportunity comes.
• causality0 6y ago
  But I always thought that if it ever happened to me, it would be a transparent process and I would have the opportunity to accept the conditions deliberately. Why would anyone think that? The point of diversity hiring is to do deliberately what we should be doing naturally until we don't have to do it deliberately anymore. I would be flatly amazed if being told you are a diversity hire is common in any industry. Can you even imagine if a college recruiter said to a prospective student "You're only being accepted because you're Native American, do you still want to attend here?"
• mbyio 6y ago
  Honestly many of the comments in this thread illustrate the author's point - there is such blatant sexism in tech, to the point that many people don't even realize it is sexism.
  • ketamine__ 6y ago
    Why don't you reply to those comments with your criticism then instead of leaving us wondering?
• edoceo 6y ago
  Yea. I'm feeling pretty good about the policy of removing name/location/photos/etc from my profile reviews on applicants. It's an attempt to block some bias inducing factors. (It's not 100%).
• soulofmischief 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but... > I have never considered that “having chemistry with the team” could be a reason for being let go. When you're working in a startup with 5 people and you're not in sync with their personalities, it can be a major drag on everyone. Having had to see people let go in startups for simply not fitting in, this has nothing to do with you being a woman and to frame it that way reduces the effectiveness of your overall narrative.
  • joshz404 6y ago
    You're excluding this part: > I had never received any feedback indicating my performance was poor. In fact, it was exactly the other way around: I’ve never had a role that was such a good fit for my expertise before. So I asked if he could detail better where I failed. He refused to.. It is completely unprofessional to fire someone having never given any feedback. Startup or not.
    • soulofmischief 6y ago
      I wasn't even necessarily defending the practice, just explaining the reason for it and why it's universal. I agree there should be better feedback. If they are annoying, have the decency to tell them why and point out a few things so they don't go from job to job wondering why they don't fit in.
    • betwixthewires 6y ago
      To me, it seems obvious (I should say though that this is speculation, even if I think I'm right) that she was fired for precisely what she's doing in the article: looking for sexism where it doesn't exist. You cannot coach that behavior, you'll get labelled sexist immediately. There's no way to correct such a problem before letting someone go. And providing reasons after the fact, as others have stated, is a bad idea because it opens up liability. You have no discriminatory reasons whatsoever for letting someone go, but you bumble some words and the next thing you know you're getting sued. Better to treat it like you're talking to the cops and just not say anything.
• d3ntb3ev1l 6y ago
  I’m over 50 and feel discriminated as a developer every day.
  • FounderBurr 6y ago
    By people giving you jobs and asking for your input?
• missosoup 6y ago
  > The time I was told at a feminist event that men are more naturally predisposed to do my job They are. This is well studied in several countries now. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... Edit for the downvoting morons: 'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Read the fucking article.
  • Peritract 6y ago
    The linked article says the exact opposite of what you are claiming: > The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.
    • missosoup 6y ago
      'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Which is what the linked article studies - the fact that as women get more choices, they choose STEM less and less. Boys are unquestionably more likely to take an interest in tech than girls, and no amount of 'equality' or active enticement aimed at girls has been able to shift that balance. The only thing left is to set diversity targets and discriminate the way that is described in TFA. And it's condescending and harmful as hell towards women who are actually good at what they do in these fields. Convincing society that every workplace should have a 50/50 gender split is one of the most nefarious things large corporates have done. They've doubled the size of the workforce while not paying a cent more for it. Which is why it takes 2 people working full time today to have the same lifestyle as one person could have funded 50 years ago. Feminism was subverted into enabling corporate greed. The messaging was quietly shifted from 'all women should have the ability to work if they choose to' to 'all women should work'.
      • Peritract 6y ago
• nimchimpsky 6y ago
  The top comments to this post are all men saying how they were discriminated against, or how she did something wrong. Fucking hackernews man, I rarely visit here now, its toxic.
• sidlls 6y ago
  "I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn." This isn't sexist. I've been told this, and I've told this to junior engineers of both genders. It's not even just a stretch to claim it's sexist, it's ridiculous to. The remark about prioritizing is actually more troublesome, and entirely independent of this comment. "Some things went well, others not so well. I am not giving you a list specifying each. It has nothing to do with your technical skills; that is normal to have room for improvement. We just feel there is a lack of chemistry with the team." This is just the way things are, especially in tech. It's not sexist, it's just unfair and dumb and political. And it's applied to all individuals. I've had it applied to me. I've been in management conversations on how to approach others to apply it to. This just isn't sexist. "Carl is a difficult person to work with. But I trust in you to accomplish this. You will use your feminine approach and you’ll be fine." "Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature, and there is nothing we can do. I see it in my children: While my son prefers video games, my daughter only cares about Facebook." These are both sexist. The first one is disgusting and might also border on sexual harassment. The second is a gross demonstration of "anecdotes are not data."
  • trhway 6y ago
    >Carl is a difficult person to work with sidenote - it is still, after more than 2 decades here, amuses me how people are allowed here to be "difficult to work with". Back in Russia - i was an engineer and later manager there - we didn't have "difficult to work with" persons, at least by the end of the first week of employment of any given person.
  • imbnwa 6y ago
    >"Some things went well, others not so well. I am not giving you a list specifying each. It has nothing to do with your technical skills; that is normal to have room for improvement. We just feel there is a lack of chemistry with the team." > >This is just the way things are, especially in tech. It's not sexist, it's just unfair and dumb and political. And it's applied to all individuals. I've had it applied to me. I've been in management conversations on how to approach others to apply it to. This just isn't sexist. I think what you're missing is that the reason a statement like this was visited upon you, or whomever poor soul you visted upon in turn, may not be sexist in your case but perhaps so in the author's. Precisely as you point out: it's dumb and political. The reasoning isn't going to be good and it's going to be opaque. Well, sexism, racism, etc are dumb, political, and opaque.
• mcculley 6y ago
  I am amused about these perceptions of bias in “tech”, especially coming from those with little experience elsewhere. I work in tech and also in the tugboat industry. My consulting work has brought me into organizations in many industries. Tech is much better at being fair to minorities and the otherwise disadvantaged than non-tech industries. I don’t know how people end up complaining about tech without noticing the rest of the world around them. Have they wondered why the people who work on their car or dispose of their garbage are primarily men? Of the misogynists and racists with whom I interact, tech has the least representation.
  • ausbah 6y ago
    this is just a rehash of "you shouldn't complain because other people have it worse"
    • mcculley 6y ago
      Not at all. I think the characterization of tech as especially bad is incorrect and put forward only by those with no experience in other industries.
      • mcculley 6y ago
        As I thought more about this, I realized (again) that the reason this happens is that people in tech are more likely to have blogs and other ways to make themselves heard. They don't see their privilege. This article could easily be titled "4 Times I Felt Discriminated Against for Being a Female" and drop the word "Developer". The oppressed in other industries don't have as much power. This reinforces the case that those who oppose the tech industry having an outsize influence on culture.
      • logan42 6y ago
        No, that’s totally what your initial statement conveys. Whether that’s your intent is a different thing.
  • Decker87 6y ago
    It's simple. Tech pays well, so that's where people feel there is the highest leverage to change outcomes.
• monkeycantype 6y ago
  I interview candidates for developer positions and the bias against women in the (Australian) developer job market seems plain to me. I work at a smallish company owned by a bigger group of companies, it is a nice place to work and family friendly, but not at the top of many people's list of exciting places to work. I don't know all the filters between me and the people submitting their resumes, but there are lots of stages and filters and the process is slow. As an unexciting company we're not getting the first draft picks from the market. By the time we get internal approval to offer a job to someone, more often than not men have another better offer, women generally don't. I believe we are able to hire women with skills and experience that would not be as available to us if they were men. Part of the dynamic would be that our company is very family friendly, and on average women are prioritising that higher than men, and thus on average ranking us higher than men, and therefore some of the bias is structural, rather than being entirely driven by personal misogyny of the recruiters and interviewers. But that would only help explain the higher availability of excellent female candidates who are prioritising raising a family, it doesn't explain my belief that we have disproportionally been able to hire women with standout level of skills and experience no intention of ever having children*, candidates that I believe would be much less likely to be available to us if they were men. (* no - I didn't ask that in the interview, I learned that afterwards, when we were work colleagues! )
• aeturnum 6y ago
  Some folks are nit-picking about which statements are really sexism and which are more universal. I can understand that but I think a better way for folks to sit with this is to pull back. Homogeneous cultures are bad at understanding how they seem to outsiders. We all lose the trees in the forest. It's not exclusive to race or gender but it comes it in particular around identities (gender, inexperience, etc) that someone has. It's really easy to say a series of statements that an insider would recognize as referencing one quality (i.e. inexperience) but an outsider could easily mistake for referencing another quality (i.e. gender). In order to learn what insiders mean, you need to be in a space where you can hear what existing insiders mean, which generally means insiders should take care with their language. This is one of the reasons I get suspicious any time "cultural fit" is brought up. It's often talked about as if the existing team has a 'good' culture, and new people might disrupt this existing good culture. However, whenever we discover a cultural mismatch between a new colleague and the existing norm, I suspect what is revealed is that the existing 'good' culture is hostile to certain other cultures. Sometimes that's a good thing (coders should be hostile to people who don't think typos should matter), but generally you want to avoid it. To put it another way: people from new backgrounds let you see your organization from a different angle. It's a rare and valuable service. If folks are going around and saying things that are earnestly meant to be supportive, but are being heard as diminutive or reductive, that's valuable data! You can learn to not do that! Take the feelings of outsiders who you would like to be insiders seriously - as primary source data - in order to grow your org beyond what it is now.
• joshgoldman 6y ago
  Wow she seems toxic, feel bad for the people who hired her and the old coworkers
• ylem 6y ago
  This is a challenging issue. I see a few reasons that companies want to increase demographic diversity. One would be that some companies are trying to address more demographically diverse markets and having more diverse teams may reveal more opportunities, or at least help to prevent blunders. For example, if you have people from many skin tones on your team, it's natural for then to say attempt to use a product on themselves and not fix it. If you don't have someone on the team (or at least in a test group) from those backgrounds, you may not think to test broadly--not that anyone was actively trying to be discriminatory--just that it's pretty natural to test things on yourself and within your network. Another reason is to have a stronger work force. A natural human thing to do is to recruit within networks--who did I go to school with? Work with? Where did I go to school? But, if I restrict myself to that pool, maybe I miss out on excellent candidates who went elsewhere. For example, I once found an amazing intern from a tiny college that I never heard of--but he was amazing (now staff at Carnegie Mellon). Finally, there are questions of social justice--organizations should reach out to populations that are underrepresented and ask if their recruiting/hiring processes have blind spots. On the recruiting side, are we reaching outside of our normal channels to recruit? For example, one of my coworkers took on an intern from a community college to do some physics/software project. The intern did well and transferred to the local state school and kept working--as a result, they got several job offers based on that work. On the hiring side, does the current methodology result in good hires? Are relevant characteristics being considered? For example, we sometimes bring on postdocs and as part of the review someone screens them based on their undergraduate grades. To me, this is dumb--no idea where it came from, I care about what they did during their PhD, not if they got a B in calculus as a teenager. It rates right up there with how fast they can run a 400 m race. Not terribly predictive of their ability to do research and probably results in the loss of some good candidates (for example, I met a young woman who went to a crap high school, spent college recovering from crap high school--she went to a small university for her masters and did incredibly well, and now she's at Harvard doing publishing good papers during her PhD--under the current system, she would probably not make it pass that screen). What happens once you have people in the institution is a longer discussion--basically, are people promoted fairly (based on performance)? Are these evenly applied?
• UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Lol, if you get a job only because you are a woman can you stil call it imposter syndrome. You are an actual imposter. There not fr your talent but lack of a penis.
• FounderBurr 6y ago
  Poor thing. Someone get her an electric blanket to warm up her ice cream.
• betwixthewires 6y ago
  > I have never considered that “having chemistry with the team” could be a reason for being let go. That about sums up these accounts of "discrimination." "I got a job because I was a girl! Which I'm totally okay with, except that I didn't know I was getting a job because I'm a girl, and that makes it discrimination."
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• henry_bone 6y ago
  This SV clip says it for me. In the words of Guilfoyle "... we should hire the best person for the job. Period." [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY
• s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Number 4 struck me as pretty toxic behavior that I wouldn't want on my team. A female coworker shared a disagreeable opinion, which the author takes it as a personal attack, bottles up their response, deems the co-worker a sexist, and judges their parenting skills to boot. Ironically, they then go on to call the event they were attending a wasted educational opportunity.
• robin21 6y ago
  > Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature This is true. There is scientific evidence that shows men prefer things, women prefer people. This is not to say women can’t succeed in tech or are not as good at tech, but the fact that women choose other fields belies this nature. Women are better at language, social interactions, etc. So when her boss says to use her “feminine” skills to talk to a difficult co-worker, it’s simply a comment on a predisposed advantage women have over men when looking at the statistics. Surprisingly, this would probably make females better managers rather than code monkeys. Managers make more money too. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/ > the times I was over-explained, or the times interviewers made a “not bad” facial expression when I replied correctly to technical questions The problem women have today is that they are programmed to see everything as sexism, when in fact such things happen regardless of sex. This really approaches disbelief. A “not bad” facial expression being sexism. When she was fired for lacking team chemistry, I don’t doubt it when you have someone psycho-analyzing every single gesture and seeing it through some sexism lens. And a junior developer out of college complaining about being “over-explained”. How hard is it to say “I am very familiar with this topic” and move on.
  • logan42 6y ago
    Nah bud, this ain’t it.
  • skavi 6y ago
    > Women are better at language, social interactions, etc. So when her boss says to use her “feminine” skills to talk to a difficult co-worker, it’s simply a comment on a predisposed advantage women have over men when looking at the statistics. This boss was clearly an amateur. A truly effective manager inputs their employees' eye colors, clothing preferences, heart rates, favorite books, and heights into the magic statistics machine to determine the correct person for each task.
  • asdff 6y ago
    >The problem women have today is that they are programmed to see everything as sexism, when in fact such things happen regardless of sex. Case in point why women feel uncomfortable in the tech industry. Men holding opinions like this lurk there.
• faridelnasire 6y ago
  Messed up people a long time ago created a very unfair pyramid with straight white men at the top and transgender black women at the bottom. And too many intelligent people today think the solution to that problem is to rotate that order, rather than to just do away with a pyramid altogether. I hope this is just an interim phase before we consider things like ethnicity and gender as arbitrary as hair color.
• LimaBearz 6y ago
  Alright I have to share. I’m brownish and never I think encountered racism. As for the women I’ve had the pleasure of working with they’ve have all been an absolute joy to work with, with the exception of one. They’re in a male dominated field and I suspect they know and work to compensate against it. I bet it must suck for them honestly to live with that pressure but as their peer its made them exceptionally competent and professional. I’d work again with them anytime enthusiastically (which is rare) The one woman I worked with that didn’t end up so well was an engineer, who when she decided she wanted to move on with her career developed a standard playbook of falsely claiming sexual harassment against an executive and walk away with a nice check in hand. Done to every employers she’s ever worked with including a few FAANGs. On a more related note about this article, I got lost on the cultural termination. I didn’t hear discrimination. I heard bad hiring practice, probably by people who don’t have a lot experience hiring. If they were smart after that term they updated their hiring practices. That’s why some startups invite you to lunch or an outing.. to avoid those issues. As a new founder having accusations like this terrify me of hiring in general. It’s different when it’s yours and not just a cog in a machine
• beams 6y ago
  Appreciate the write up with specific examples. I haven’t been discriminated against at work (that I’m aware of) and try very, very hard to avoid it (though I’m sure I have failed unknowingly). This helps remind me of how it can happen whether intentional or not.
• oliv__ 6y ago
  boo hoo, let's hear more about your pity party
• Decker87 6y ago
  While being a diversity hire is understandably awkward, I'm not sure what the author expects? She supports the idea, but doesn't want the feeling that comes with it.
• oji0hub 6y ago
  About this quote: > “Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature, and there is nothing we can do. I see it in my children: While my son prefers video games, my daughter only cares about Facebook.” We can see that adult women and men make different choices. We can go back in time and see they made different choices as teenagers and young adult when on average they chose to study different things. In the example above, her children make different choices as children. A counter argument might be that different toys are targeted at girls and boys. It sounds like a possible explanation, but could it be that the reason different toys are targeted at girls and boys is because of different preferences? If there is demand, someone will deliver the supply. If we take another step back in time and look at infants, we get the answer. Show newly born infants things and faces and the boys are more interested in the things and the girls are more interested in the faces (people). So yes, there is an average difference in interest - not a difference in intelligence or ability, but in interest. There is also plenty of overlap. Many women and men are interested in the same things. Some women are very interested in technology. Some men are very interested in people. But on average, there is a significant difference. Is this a problem? Only if we consider the typical male preference for technology to be better or superior than the typical female preference for people. This is where the real problem lies. Men and women are, on average, different. Let's appreciate our differences.
  • bagacrap 6y ago
    > Is this a problem? It's a problem if one applies the typical to the specific. If a woman is sitting in front of you and you assume her characteristics match the mean of all women's characteristics, congrats, you are sexist.
• cambaceres 6y ago
  Point 1 and 2 shows why hiring based on gender instead of merit is a bad idea. It would have been way better for the author of this post to have been turned down by the diversity seekers and found a company that was looking for someone with her skillset and personality instead. Point 3 is such a stupid thing to say. I don't know about reporting him for it, how about just telling him that he is stupid and condescending? That would work in Sweden at least, maybe there is a different work culture in USA. Point 4 is actually true, proved scienctifically, and has nothing to do with discrimination. Due to differences in the brain that we are born with, men are on average more interested in technology than women. That does not mean that you can point to a specific women and draw the conclusion that because she is a women she is less suited to work in tech than a man. It does however explain why more men than female study computer science for example. Yes, I'm sure phenomens like computer games biased towards male might enhance this, but even without it you would see the differences. Before you downvote me because I'm a sexist, please have a look here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-mens-brains-are-wired-differently-than-women/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-mens-brains-a... https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...
  • higerordermap 6y ago
    Unfortunately, today's radfem crowd quotes science only when it fits their agenda.
• jerome-jh 6y ago
  From what I can read organizations are somewhat awkward in their efforts to help women. Otherwise from the article: 1 & 3: the internship mentor is honest even when saying "interns have to learn". This is not discrimination. The fact UI dev interns do not pass a test versus data science interns is not that shocking. In 3 he tries to solve his problems with the help of the intern. That's quite unfair. At the minimum he should have obtained the intern's agreement beforehand, whether a man or woman. 2: a company of assholes 4: I guess companies should not single out women once they are on payroll. That's not helping them.