5 ms·

> It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard. I have intervi

by jawns 5y ago

> It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard. I have interviewed a bunch of women and non-white devs lately, and I doubt they would agree with you. This morning I interviewed a very impressive woman of color who said that she's struggled to find engineering jobs. I've noticed that it can be MUCH harder to find women and non-white candidates when your existing engineering team does not already have much gender/racial diversity. And that stands to reason. Nobody wants to be the token "diverse" hire. Is it possible that your company has already developed a reputation for its lack of diversity, so those candidates just aren't interested?

dijit 5y ago
I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure). We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well. This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down. I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual. The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  I, too, feel guilty sometimes about being in the position I'm in as a straight white man. But at the end of the day, I have two options: quit, or use my position to better change the world, for lack of a better term. Despite being a white male, I am also a marginalized member of society due to my disability. Because of this, I spend a lot of time thinking about diversity and what it means and how we can improve our workplaces to be more inclusive and welcoming to marginalized groups. I feel you. Don't let it get you down. Let's try and use our privilege to make the tech industry a more inclusive and welcoming place for those who do not have our privileges. Good luck. :)
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  > (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD) Just my opinion; as an aside. ANY engineer worth his or her salt, should be able to pivot from one to another. This is probably THE primary skill an engineer should have. Industry hiring practices mostly disqualify candidates based on this type of thing, and it's a terrible practice, and it leads to good qualified engineers getting pigeonholed into a skills-dead-end. Most of the basic computer skills are applicable across all platforms. If they want to specialize in some skill set that you as an employer do not utilize, then they won't apply anyway. So I'm saying; hire engineers who could use some professional development.
  - readonthegoapp 5y ago
    If you think MS-focussed people are generally low-skill and uninterested, it will be difficult to hire them for a non-MS skill (or any skill, for that matter). But that can apply generally. Need C# but they only know Java? Cancel. I'm fine with canceling people who are lazy or not smart or not interested, but canceling someone because of their stack just seems like finding plausible deniability.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate) That's incredibly racist.
andyxor 5y ago
more likely they optimize along the same dimensions as FAANG companies, i.e. proficiency in Leetcode and memorizing "system design" templates. This leads to implicit discrimination against anyone who doesn't spend months grinding for these "exams", with the same distribution of "grades" across races/ethnicities/genders as e.g. math tests in schools.
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  We don't do this, actually. Our take-home code challenge is fairly straightforward (I suspect anyone with 2-3 years of real-world experience could complete it in a few hours). I do spend about 45-60 minutes per candidate in a phone screen to talk with them and get a sense of their experience. Our on-sites convert to hires at a pretty high ratio, because I try not to bring people on-site unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to hire them, and while we do a few whiteboarding exercises, my team is trained to ask questions that don't have a single correct solution. This isn't about memorizing trivia questions. It's about critical thinking skills and problem solving in real-time, and that's what we're trying to measure. If I give them a question and they take the entire 30 minutes to get halfway to the answer, that's OK. But, having interviewed at a number of other companies in Silicon Valley, you aren't wrong. Most companies optimize on the FAANG dimensions and it's not particularly accessible for anyone who hasn't spent months grinding on those challenges. Not a good way to hire, imo.
  - handrous 5y ago
    This is not a dig at you, but describing even relatively humane processes like this to folks who aren't in tech will get you some real WTF reactions. Hours of homework to even get an actual interview, for example. "Whiteboarding" sessions in which one often has very little idea what will be asked about in advance (yours may not have this problem, but, for all that's shitty about FAANG-style interviews, at least it's pretty clear what sort of thing you need to be ready for—lots of other companies seem to want to keep even hints at the specifics of their interview process hush-hush like if it's not a goddamn pop-quiz drawing from potentially all of software development, trivia about languages and systems, and CS, then it won't work). The sheer length of the interview process is often surprising to people outside our industry, even. Multi-step and a single one of those steps may involve being grilled for half a day or more? That alone will get you some puzzled or alarmed looks from non-tech folks.
Jemaclus 5y ago
Totally possible! I'm just going by my own experience. Most of the applicants I've seen have been unqualified, though, at least going by their resumes. I'd love to find some talented women of color to join
throwitoutpls 5y ago
My company tries to go out of its way to be inclusive in the hiring process (including trying to do away with requirements etc) and the hiring pipeline is predominantly white/Asian men, and outside of it the occasional Asian woman. The really rare candidate that falls out of this category interviews alright at best and we have given them offers in the past. Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme. The poster clearly mentions they want to increase diversity and unless they do something sexist /racist as part of their interview what more are they supposed to do? If they look all white now what are they supposed to do about it? Find the token colored person from some corner of the company and paste them in every page in their website?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme. Nobody will acknowledge it publicly but diversity-quota and affirmative action is actually hurting minority candidates. Some places are notorious for lowering the bar for "diverse" applicants. So when faced with a resume, I know that the non-diverse candidate got there on merit alone. But the "diverse" one? Maybe it was merit, maybe it was the quota... Why should I be the one to take the risk?
  - Jemaclus 5y ago
    I can't speak for anyone else, but as far as my hiring process, I don't interview like 5 candidates to decide which one I want for one position. I interview them one at a time, and if I think you are qualified enough to meet or beat my standards, then you get an offer. The strategy closely follows optimal solution for The Secretary Problem[0], and I passed the cutoff interview years ago. (I am very fortunate in this regard in that I've never really had headcount restrictions because every company I've ever worked for has basically told me "HIRE HIRE HIRE HIRE" and I can never actually hire enough people to fill that headcount.) With that in mind, from my perspective the goal of diversity is to increase the number of diverse candidates in the pipeline, which should theoretically lead to an increase in diverse talent on the teams. The goal is NOT to reduce the number of white men in the pipeline. In other words, if you're a cis straight white guy and you're qualified, I'm not going to say "no, I don't need another white guy" and reject you just because of your race and gender. First and foremost, that's illegal. And second, it's a dick move. And I try really hard to live by Wheaton's Law[1]. I've never done that and don't intend to ever do that. Talent is talent, and any hiring manager would be an idiot to turn it away for arbitrary reasons. (Sadly, there are a lot of idiots out there.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem [1] http://www.wheatonslaw.com/ http://www.wheatonslaw.com/
curun1r 5y ago
These anecdote-for-anecdote hiring threads are often missing crucial elements like location. Even now with most jobs being significantly remote, hiring is very regional. Problems in one job market will often be non-problems in another and, especially where race is concerned, the demographics of different cities can be wildly different. There’s also other ways the hiring pool becomes fragmented such as area of focus (e.g. game dev vs web dev vs embedded dev) that make employees non-fungible. I guess the point is that both can be true. There can be a frustrating shortage of qualified under-represented minorities available to companies and it can be hard for qualified under-represented minorities to find work. The job market is not like the financial markets where money can mostly move fluidly to the area of highest opportunity. Job fits are more complex and we should naturally expect a much less efficient allocation of employees.

by jawns 5y ago

dijit 5y ago

I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure). We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well. This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down. I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual. The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.

Jemaclus 5y ago
I, too, feel guilty sometimes about being in the position I'm in as a straight white man. But at the end of the day, I have two options: quit, or use my position to better change the world, for lack of a better term. Despite being a white male, I am also a marginalized member of society due to my disability. Because of this, I spend a lot of time thinking about diversity and what it means and how we can improve our workplaces to be more inclusive and welcoming to marginalized groups. I feel you. Don't let it get you down. Let's try and use our privilege to make the tech industry a more inclusive and welcoming place for those who do not have our privileges. Good luck. :)
Pokepokalypse 5y ago
> (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD) Just my opinion; as an aside. ANY engineer worth his or her salt, should be able to pivot from one to another. This is probably THE primary skill an engineer should have. Industry hiring practices mostly disqualify candidates based on this type of thing, and it's a terrible practice, and it leads to good qualified engineers getting pigeonholed into a skills-dead-end. Most of the basic computer skills are applicable across all platforms. If they want to specialize in some skill set that you as an employer do not utilize, then they won't apply anyway. So I'm saying; hire engineers who could use some professional development.
- readonthegoapp 5y ago
  If you think MS-focussed people are generally low-skill and uninterested, it will be difficult to hire them for a non-MS skill (or any skill, for that matter). But that can apply generally. Need C# but they only know Java? Cancel. I'm fine with canceling people who are lazy or not smart or not interested, but canceling someone because of their stack just seems like finding plausible deniability.
908B64B197 5y ago
> we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate) That's incredibly racist.

andyxor 5y ago

more likely they optimize along the same dimensions as FAANG companies, i.e. proficiency in Leetcode and memorizing "system design" templates. This leads to implicit discrimination against anyone who doesn't spend months grinding for these "exams", with the same distribution of "grades" across races/ethnicities/genders as e.g. math tests in schools.

Jemaclus 5y ago
We don't do this, actually. Our take-home code challenge is fairly straightforward (I suspect anyone with 2-3 years of real-world experience could complete it in a few hours). I do spend about 45-60 minutes per candidate in a phone screen to talk with them and get a sense of their experience. Our on-sites convert to hires at a pretty high ratio, because I try not to bring people on-site unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to hire them, and while we do a few whiteboarding exercises, my team is trained to ask questions that don't have a single correct solution. This isn't about memorizing trivia questions. It's about critical thinking skills and problem solving in real-time, and that's what we're trying to measure. If I give them a question and they take the entire 30 minutes to get halfway to the answer, that's OK. But, having interviewed at a number of other companies in Silicon Valley, you aren't wrong. Most companies optimize on the FAANG dimensions and it's not particularly accessible for anyone who hasn't spent months grinding on those challenges. Not a good way to hire, imo.
- handrous 5y ago
  This is not a dig at you, but describing even relatively humane processes like this to folks who aren't in tech will get you some real WTF reactions. Hours of homework to even get an actual interview, for example. "Whiteboarding" sessions in which one often has very little idea what will be asked about in advance (yours may not have this problem, but, for all that's shitty about FAANG-style interviews, at least it's pretty clear what sort of thing you need to be ready for—lots of other companies seem to want to keep even hints at the specifics of their interview process hush-hush like if it's not a goddamn pop-quiz drawing from potentially all of software development, trivia about languages and systems, and CS, then it won't work). The sheer length of the interview process is often surprising to people outside our industry, even. Multi-step and a single one of those steps may involve being grilled for half a day or more? That alone will get you some puzzled or alarmed looks from non-tech folks.

Jemaclus 5y ago

Totally possible! I'm just going by my own experience. Most of the applicants I've seen have been unqualified, though, at least going by their resumes. I'd love to find some talented women of color to join

throwitoutpls 5y ago

My company tries to go out of its way to be inclusive in the hiring process (including trying to do away with requirements etc) and the hiring pipeline is predominantly white/Asian men, and outside of it the occasional Asian woman. The really rare candidate that falls out of this category interviews alright at best and we have given them offers in the past. Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme. The poster clearly mentions they want to increase diversity and unless they do something sexist /racist as part of their interview what more are they supposed to do? If they look all white now what are they supposed to do about it? Find the token colored person from some corner of the company and paste them in every page in their website?

908B64B197 5y ago
> Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme. Nobody will acknowledge it publicly but diversity-quota and affirmative action is actually hurting minority candidates. Some places are notorious for lowering the bar for "diverse" applicants. So when faced with a resume, I know that the non-diverse candidate got there on merit alone. But the "diverse" one? Maybe it was merit, maybe it was the quota... Why should I be the one to take the risk?
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  I can't speak for anyone else, but as far as my hiring process, I don't interview like 5 candidates to decide which one I want for one position. I interview them one at a time, and if I think you are qualified enough to meet or beat my standards, then you get an offer. The strategy closely follows optimal solution for The Secretary Problem[0], and I passed the cutoff interview years ago. (I am very fortunate in this regard in that I've never really had headcount restrictions because every company I've ever worked for has basically told me "HIRE HIRE HIRE HIRE" and I can never actually hire enough people to fill that headcount.) With that in mind, from my perspective the goal of diversity is to increase the number of diverse candidates in the pipeline, which should theoretically lead to an increase in diverse talent on the teams. The goal is NOT to reduce the number of white men in the pipeline. In other words, if you're a cis straight white guy and you're qualified, I'm not going to say "no, I don't need another white guy" and reject you just because of your race and gender. First and foremost, that's illegal. And second, it's a dick move. And I try really hard to live by Wheaton's Law[1]. I've never done that and don't intend to ever do that. Talent is talent, and any hiring manager would be an idiot to turn it away for arbitrary reasons. (Sadly, there are a lot of idiots out there.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem [1] http://www.wheatonslaw.com/ http://www.wheatonslaw.com/

curun1r 5y ago

These anecdote-for-anecdote hiring threads are often missing crucial elements like location. Even now with most jobs being significantly remote, hiring is very regional. Problems in one job market will often be non-problems in another and, especially where race is concerned, the demographics of different cities can be wildly different. There’s also other ways the hiring pool becomes fragmented such as area of focus (e.g. game dev vs web dev vs embedded dev) that make employees non-fungible. I guess the point is that both can be true. There can be a frustrating shortage of qualified under-represented minorities available to companies and it can be hard for qualified under-represented minorities to find work. The job market is not like the financial markets where money can mostly move fluidly to the area of highest opportunity. Job fits are more complex and we should naturally expect a much less efficient allocation of employees.