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The Pushback Effects of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Age in Code Review

4 points by zdw 5y ago

twofornone 5y ago
>Theory and hypotheses. Our study is grounded in role congruity theory, which states that a member of a group will receive negative evaluations when stereotypes about the group misalign with the perceived qualities necessary to succeed in a role So like most papers in grievance studies, the authors decided that a problem existed and then went looking for evidence. >Applying this to our context, the theory predicts that code reviews will be evaluated nega- tively when the author of a code change belongs to a group whose stereotypes do not align with the perceived qualities...With respect to gender, we hypothesize that reviews of women coders will be more negative than reviews of men. The rationale is the role mismatch between “the pervasive cultural associations linking men but not women with raw intellectual talent” and that computer science is perceived by some to require high “innate intellectual talent And in line with typical grievance studies dogma, the crux of this paper rests on the nonsensical, assumption that all demographics are equally competent in all domains on average and, implicitly, that the only possible explanation for discrepancies in average evaluations is discrimination based on some immutable trait. It's offensive that these ideologues are so blindly rigid in their orthodoxy that they do not even allow for the consideration of alternative, blatantly obvious explanations; namely that 1. In this suicidal push for diversity, minority candidates are effectively selected from a much smaller pool of candidates, because of ubiquitous pipeline problems across virtually all domains (a fact also overlooked in the fashionable rush to paint all of our institutions as racist). If competence is distributed normally and interviewers are vying for high performers, then there will be fewer competent candidates because of the shape of the normal distribution 2. Cultural/social norms influence competence, e.g. historically straight white males were far more likely than other demographics, especially women, to write software outside of work and/or start coding at an earlier age 3. Sexual dimorphism (and genes, big taboo, I know) also play a role in selection and development of interests and raw talent Unfathomable that these culture warriors are allowed to masquerade as scientists at practically all of our once respectable universities. And the degree to which this toxic thinking has infested all of our institutions is unbelievable given its glaring (deliberate?) blindness to internal differences among demographics. No, it couldn't possibly be that women are on average less interested in and therefore less competent at coding, it must be sexism. These people are not practicing science, merely laying a pseudoscientific foundation for the increasingly open and widespread discrimination against straight white males. For a brief moment we finally achieved a society where race/gender blindness were the norm; ironically this boneheadedness is only reversing that progress, breeding racial awareness in whites as an increasingly justified form of self preservation. Equality of outcome is fundamentally incompatible with human nature in anything resembling a meritocracy. Despite mostly good intentions, this institutionally sanctioned anti-intellectualism is taking us down a very dark path.
JoeyBananas 5y ago
I dislike the ACM as an organization. They spend resources on politicizing computer science rather than actually doing any computer science. You see ACM posters around campus, and think "wow cool a computer science club! maybe I should join." Then you realize that they do nothing but have dry meetings about leftist politics. As for this paper in particular, I bet that these results are due to diversity hires producing lower quality code. I think that's more likely than Google being racist.

4 points by zdw 5y ago

>Theory and hypotheses. Our study is grounded in role congruity theory, which states that a member of a group will receive negative evaluations when stereotypes about the group misalign with the perceived qualities necessary to succeed in a role So like most papers in grievance studies, the authors decided that a problem existed and then went looking for evidence. >Applying this to our context, the theory predicts that code reviews will be evaluated nega- tively when the author of a code change belongs to a group whose stereotypes do not align with the perceived qualities...With respect to gender, we hypothesize that reviews of women coders will be more negative than reviews of men. The rationale is the role mismatch between “the pervasive cultural associations linking men but not women with raw intellectual talent” and that computer science is perceived by some to require high “innate intellectual talent And in line with typical grievance studies dogma, the crux of this paper rests on the nonsensical, assumption that all demographics are equally competent in all domains on average and, implicitly, that the only possible explanation for discrepancies in average evaluations is discrimination based on some immutable trait. It's offensive that these ideologues are so blindly rigid in their orthodoxy that they do not even allow for the consideration of alternative, blatantly obvious explanations; namely that 1. In this suicidal push for diversity, minority candidates are effectively selected from a much smaller pool of candidates, because of ubiquitous pipeline problems across virtually all domains (a fact also overlooked in the fashionable rush to paint all of our institutions as racist). If competence is distributed normally and interviewers are vying for high performers, then there will be fewer competent candidates because of the shape of the normal distribution 2. Cultural/social norms influence competence, e.g. historically straight white males were far more likely than other demographics, especially women, to write software outside of work and/or start coding at an earlier age 3. Sexual dimorphism (and genes, big taboo, I know) also play a role in selection and development of interests and raw talent Unfathomable that these culture warriors are allowed to masquerade as scientists at practically all of our once respectable universities. And the degree to which this toxic thinking has infested all of our institutions is unbelievable given its glaring (deliberate?) blindness to internal differences among demographics. No, it couldn't possibly be that women are on average less interested in and therefore less competent at coding, it must be sexism. These people are not practicing science, merely laying a pseudoscientific foundation for the increasingly open and widespread discrimination against straight white males. For a brief moment we finally achieved a society where race/gender blindness were the norm; ironically this boneheadedness is only reversing that progress, breeding racial awareness in whites as an increasingly justified form of self preservation. Equality of outcome is fundamentally incompatible with human nature in anything resembling a meritocracy. Despite mostly good intentions, this institutionally sanctioned anti-intellectualism is taking us down a very dark path.

JoeyBananas 5y ago

I dislike the ACM as an organization. They spend resources on politicizing computer science rather than actually doing any computer science. You see ACM posters around campus, and think "wow cool a computer science club! maybe I should join." Then you realize that they do nothing but have dry meetings about leftist politics. As for this paper in particular, I bet that these results are due to diversity hires producing lower quality code. I think that's more likely than Google being racist.