10 ms·

Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously s

Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none. When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black people at such a rate that there literally are not enough black people in the country to meet that quota. And yet, this sort of brainless activism continues unabated - why I can't begin to guess. I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided. It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those careers, that's perfectly fine.
- pavl- 2y ago
  One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel" isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't personally impact you?
  - gedy 2y ago
    I hear stories like this, but now after 25 years in the industry, no place I've worked at would have ever tolerated this, nor have I seen or heard this happen from colleagues. Granted I've worked mostly in California, but still seems so foreign to me.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Seriously, every instance I'm aware of men having done something like that where I worked (and it's happened more than once), they've been fired either the next day or the same week. The solution there has nothing to do with hiring more women, and everything to do with zero tolerance for a sexist environment. I mean, that happening is just insane. This isn't the 1950's.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Even in Chicago 30 years ago I cannot imagine that happening where I worked. Women were pretty well represented in tech there, incidentally. My immediate supervisor was a woman and I was the only male on my team. This was in IT in financial services. I would guess the whole department was 60:40 male:female.
    - pavl- 2y ago
      I have a first-hand experience once or twice a year that make me stop and think -- if I were a woman in this situation I'd probably be doubting my career path. The example I cited is particularly egregious, but I have seen several other examples from a variety of companies: - two guys on a zoom call joking that someone's camera was off because they were doing "weird stuff" - manager from another team drunkenly telling a 24 year old at a holiday party that he would leave his wife for her - software system named "naggy_wife" - coworker telling younger coworker to "not get married because you will never have sex again" I am passing along these anecdotes because they're more easy to empathize with than some of the more general arguments of why it can be hard to succeed in tech as a woman (but they really only tell part of the story). Some of my other anecdotes might also sound closer to things you've seen or heard at the work place, or perhaps it's easier to see how some of these things might have happened without you being aware of them, given their (relative) infrequency and the contexts in which they arise. All of them happened without an HR incident (like, really, should a guy who wrote a system called "naggy-wife" get in trouble? a choice was made like 20 years ago... and maybe the guy doesn't even work there anymore). But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up and contribute to the relatively common feeling among female engineers that they "don't belong".
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's just very difficult to affect these in the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole. Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered folks, come from how parents push their values onto their kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved interests because of ideas they had about masculinity and femininity. My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."
  - annzabelle 2y ago
    I'm not sure that's entirely what's to blame when the countries with the least gender discrimination (Scandinavia) tend to be about 20% female in tech. I think that when people are free to choose their fields based purely on personal inclination, without major financial incentive, tech lands at about 20% female and early childhood education ends up being the opposite. Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20% female and we easily end up with spirals where departments end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring in math instead of cs because of that process at my college.
    - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
      Yeah I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the answers. You might be right. I guess the interesting point of discussion here is "personal inclination". A lot of my female friends have stories about how their parents encouraged their brothers to fix things around the house, get their hands dirty, read manuals, and set up new appliances. They tell me how they were, conversely, encouraged to make friends, maintain relationships, and steered toward more aesthetic pursuits like art, drama, or music. My sister, at an age when she had no strong interests of her own, was given paintbrushes and nice paper as gifts by our parents but not Legos because they felt like girls were more likely to enjoy aesthetic things than mechanical things. Funny enough, as an adult she has neither mechanical nor aesthetic interests. The question I guess is how much of "personal inclination" is driven by these small decisions of what options we give to kids. I will say my experiences are colored by the fact that my family is a low-income immigrant family in the US from a culture with definite gender discrimination and so they hold stronger gender prejudices than probably a high-income Scandinavian family. My guess is also that younger generations have grown up with a much better idea of gender equality and will raise their kids with less of this prejudice. I also observed in my school that a lot of women felt more comfortable in the math department than CS (though CS had much less prestige compared to now), so thanks for your story and background.
- eapressoandcats 2y ago
  Except fields often aren’t open to people in different demographics. Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified.
  - wyager 2y ago
    > Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    The problem is that when you quantify sexism in tech objectively, the results aren't what most people expect. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest except that it's not, which is the problem that DEI initiatives tried to compensate for
npteljes 2y ago
I think these efforts need to be done at every level at the same time, and I agree that the "lower" or "earlier" levels need to be prioritized. Similar to how prevention is usually preferred to reaction.
morkalork 2y ago
You're absolutely correct and I think it's what drives all the resentment about DEI programs. People aren't dumb, when they see some group only makes up 3% of the population of engineers and they see a program trying to balance senior positions, they're going to feel its unfair bs. What's really interesting is that almost every woman I've worked with professionaly isn't from North America, they're all from India, Iran and Eastern Europe (Belarus, Bulgaria etc). There's something deeply wrong with the culture here that's screwing up the top of the funnel.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on down the funnel. There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes elsewhere in the system... obviously.
- blitzar 2y ago
  (~2018) In India, women represent 45% of total computer science enrollment in universities, almost three times the rate in the United States, where it is 18%.
  - morkalork 2y ago
    And in Iran, it's even higher (1). It is not what you would expect from either country based on the stereotypes people have in their minds. (1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-take-over-tech-70-of-irans-science-and-engineering-students-are-women/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta...
    - iforgot22 2y ago
      The stereotype in my mind is that countries in Asia prioritize STEM a lot, so this makes sense to me. And they don't call it STEM, it's just school.
kevinh 2y ago
People oppose efforts to make changes at the other end of the funnel too. This is the most popular post about Girls Who Code (the first organization that comes to mind, why I searched it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431 You get similar complaints there.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- like_any_other 2y ago
  That post is mostly factual observations, a reporting of lived experiences, if you will, not complaint.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  There's a background assumption in this debate that society has a moral requirement to increase the representation of those who are underrepresented. I've never seen this assumption justified. What if it is actually fine for Asians to be under-represented in the NBA, and over-represented in software engineering?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - guax 2y ago
    I guess it depends a lot on the reason why they're under represented. Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense. I'm not so sure companies and schools are just passive in a cultural preference environment. And by not so sure I mean I am pretty confident there is tons of discrimination, I've seen it.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense UFC (and all other fighting sports) segment based on weight class. Plenty of flyweight fighters look scrawny when wearing a shirt. Also some of the most intense Muay Thai fighters I've ever sparred are skinny Thai guys from farming villages in Isaan who showed hallmarks of malnutrition (stunted height and extremely thin physique compared to Isaan Thai who grew up in BKK or even towns like Khon Kaen). And this brings up a good point - you need to make an effort to build a pipeline from an fairness standpoint. Not everyone has to be a SWE, but everyone should get an equal chance to try and become one. Plenty of kids end up in crap schools with few resources to succeed in a STEM major, or are limited by social or cultural norms from actually trying to major in STEM. This goes both ways - women and African Americans are underrepresented in CS. No way around that. It should be solved. Same way men are underrepresented in teaching and nursing, and it should be solved as well. This whole conversation around DEI became unneccesarily heated due to mutual political ambitions. At the end of the day, everyone should have a fair chance at trying an industry or field, and because the world isn't a fair playing field, it doesn't hurt to try and build an ecosystem by incentivizing a pipeline.
kenferry 2y ago
Mm. It’s certainly good to work at the other end of the funnel (thank you!) but it also won’t help address pattern matching that people do in hiring. It’s an incredibly natural thing for people to hire people like themselves, or people they meet their image of what a top notch software dev looks like. It requires active effort to counteract this. One can definitely argue about the efficacy of DEI approaches, but I disagree that JUST increasing the strength of applicants will address the issue.
- subarctic 2y ago
  Yes it will! That pattern matching is based on prior experience and if the entire makeup of candidates changes that'll cause people to pattern match differently. If old prejudices are taking a while to die out, it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
  - joshuamorton 2y ago
    > it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!
    - deleted 2y ago
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  - kenferry 2y ago
    That's an efficient market theory, and it's extremely optimistic about how real people work.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  If the goal is to prevent people from being biased, why not anonymize candidate packets? Zoom interviews can also be anonymized easily. If it's the case that equally strong, or stronger, candidates are being passed over anonymization should solve this. Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.
specialp 2y ago
The start of the funnel is also the most racist and class discriminatory. Almost every school in the USA takes pupils from districts where the property owners pay the taxes for the schools. Rich areas get much more resources and support. Poor students get put into less funded schools and suffer from not having mentorship or peers to look up to. I live on Long Island and we have a majority white population. Despite that we have 2 school districts that are almost 100% black. That is where the problem is. You are not giving these students a chance. When I am going through resumes I am not getting a diverse pool of qualified candidates because these poor people have been historically oppressed into a caste of poor schooling and neighborhoods.
- polski-g 2y ago
  Most of what you said is just wrong. "Poor students" have the most support in the country: https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2024/are-poor-urban-districts-really-underfunded https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2024/are-poor-urban-districts-... Baltimore public schools get $30k per student. Carmel, IN public schools spend $10k per student. You should look into heritability. There is no longitudinal impact on adult outcomes as a result of parenting/schooling practices.
  - jyounker 2y ago
    I'm assuming you are not familiar with this study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_0416.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04... It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school district to a richer school district, and they have children under 13, then those children are significantly more successful than children whose families remain in the poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be a slight negative effect. There are other studies showing similar effedcts. Summary: It's not genetics.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      A lot of that has to do with who your kid goes to school with. If we take equally funded schools (in WA that’s easy since education is primarily funded by the state), the results are still different: districts with richer families do better probably because they get more support at home, but even lower income students do better since they feel like they need to keep up with their classmates.
whimsicalism 2y ago
i think that i've seen in my lifetime AA in hiring absolutely translate to shifts in undergrad composition. not sure if it spills over to highschool, but it definitely does when people are choosing what to do in college.
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  In my experience girls want to do CS but they lack confidence and are given too many opportunities to opt for something easier where they think they’ll be more successful. (I don’t know about any other of the diversity axes as much.)
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    interesting. not going to comment too much on this, but this idea would seemingly be belied by the well-known STEM gender-equality paradox.
draw_down 2y ago
[dead]
golly_ned 2y ago
Just noting for those interested to check out Microsoft TEALS.
JofArnold 2y ago
I definitely recognize what you're saying and it's fantastic, but hiring managers and execs do indeed need to be active on this too. The channels to reach out to more diverse candidate are more often than not different to those recruiters use to find your "average white guy in a hoodie". That's decreasingly the case for women (and I use that term very intentionally; I'm not talking generally "non-male" here), but social media and professional networking is quite hostile and/or intimidating to other groups. While the business benefits of putting in this extra effort in are obvious (it's a no brainer to seek out overlooked top talent, let alone the benefits of culture and diverse experiences), those benefits aren't always aligned with the hiring team who are incentivized in most companies to hit numbers. The business goals need to be driven from above by DEI initiatives or - if not - hiring manager allies who'll put their foot down.
danny_codes 2y ago
Completely agree. IMO we should start with paid maternity/paternity leave, childcare subsidies, and free Pre-K. Just get things started on the right foot. I think we're the only developed country without paid maternity leave. It's pathetic.
Chilko 2y ago
I totally agree. At the previous company I worked for, we decided to sponsor a 3-year scholarship (paid directly to the student, not just covering fees) at a local uni that targeted high-school leavers from demographics that were underrepresented in both our company and the wider industry we were in (renewables/energy sector). Trying to hire more people from those demographics is futile if the candidates don't exist, so the idea was to encourage people to choose this pathway. The scholarship is for students who would choose a certain program/specialization relevant for our industry and includes a paid summer internship at our company after their 2nd or 3rd year of study. Having mentored some of these students when they were interns (capable and bright students with promising futures), they said that this scholarship helped them choose this career path whereas otherwise they may have just tried to get into tech like many others at that university. Note this was not in the USA but in New Zealand where we have a different colonial history we are reckoning with. The scholarship targeted women, Maori (our indigenous culture), and Pacific Islanders (a large ethnic minority in NZ). This less about meeting any ratios or quotas (we didn't have those), but rather we felt a distinct lack of e.g. Maori voices in our company and the industry which is a problem when you are frequently interacting with Maori stakeholders and landowners in energy project development (and indigenous relations and historical landonwership plays a large role in our consenting & planning process).

bigstrat2003 2y ago

This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black people at such a rate that there literally are not enough black people in the country to meet that quota. And yet, this sort of brainless activism continues unabated - why I can't begin to guess. I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided. It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those careers, that's perfectly fine.

pavl- 2y ago
One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel" isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't personally impact you?
- gedy 2y ago
  I hear stories like this, but now after 25 years in the industry, no place I've worked at would have ever tolerated this, nor have I seen or heard this happen from colleagues. Granted I've worked mostly in California, but still seems so foreign to me.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Seriously, every instance I'm aware of men having done something like that where I worked (and it's happened more than once), they've been fired either the next day or the same week. The solution there has nothing to do with hiring more women, and everything to do with zero tolerance for a sexist environment. I mean, that happening is just insane. This isn't the 1950's.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Even in Chicago 30 years ago I cannot imagine that happening where I worked. Women were pretty well represented in tech there, incidentally. My immediate supervisor was a woman and I was the only male on my team. This was in IT in financial services. I would guess the whole department was 60:40 male:female.
  - pavl- 2y ago
    I have a first-hand experience once or twice a year that make me stop and think -- if I were a woman in this situation I'd probably be doubting my career path. The example I cited is particularly egregious, but I have seen several other examples from a variety of companies: - two guys on a zoom call joking that someone's camera was off because they were doing "weird stuff" - manager from another team drunkenly telling a 24 year old at a holiday party that he would leave his wife for her - software system named "naggy_wife" - coworker telling younger coworker to "not get married because you will never have sex again" I am passing along these anecdotes because they're more easy to empathize with than some of the more general arguments of why it can be hard to succeed in tech as a woman (but they really only tell part of the story). Some of my other anecdotes might also sound closer to things you've seen or heard at the work place, or perhaps it's easier to see how some of these things might have happened without you being aware of them, given their (relative) infrequency and the contexts in which they arise. All of them happened without an HR incident (like, really, should a guy who wrote a system called "naggy-wife" get in trouble? a choice was made like 20 years ago... and maybe the guy doesn't even work there anymore). But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up and contribute to the relatively common feeling among female engineers that they "don't belong".
Karrot_Kream 2y ago
The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's just very difficult to affect these in the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole. Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered folks, come from how parents push their values onto their kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved interests because of ideas they had about masculinity and femininity. My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."
- annzabelle 2y ago
  I'm not sure that's entirely what's to blame when the countries with the least gender discrimination (Scandinavia) tend to be about 20% female in tech. I think that when people are free to choose their fields based purely on personal inclination, without major financial incentive, tech lands at about 20% female and early childhood education ends up being the opposite. Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20% female and we easily end up with spirals where departments end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring in math instead of cs because of that process at my college.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    Yeah I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the answers. You might be right. I guess the interesting point of discussion here is "personal inclination". A lot of my female friends have stories about how their parents encouraged their brothers to fix things around the house, get their hands dirty, read manuals, and set up new appliances. They tell me how they were, conversely, encouraged to make friends, maintain relationships, and steered toward more aesthetic pursuits like art, drama, or music. My sister, at an age when she had no strong interests of her own, was given paintbrushes and nice paper as gifts by our parents but not Legos because they felt like girls were more likely to enjoy aesthetic things than mechanical things. Funny enough, as an adult she has neither mechanical nor aesthetic interests. The question I guess is how much of "personal inclination" is driven by these small decisions of what options we give to kids. I will say my experiences are colored by the fact that my family is a low-income immigrant family in the US from a culture with definite gender discrimination and so they hold stronger gender prejudices than probably a high-income Scandinavian family. My guess is also that younger generations have grown up with a much better idea of gender equality and will raise their kids with less of this prejudice. I also observed in my school that a lot of women felt more comfortable in the math department than CS (though CS had much less prestige compared to now), so thanks for your story and background.
eapressoandcats 2y ago
Except fields often aren’t open to people in different demographics. Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified.
- wyager 2y ago
  > Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  The problem is that when you quantify sexism in tech objectively, the results aren't what most people expect. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest except that it's not, which is the problem that DEI initiatives tried to compensate for

npteljes 2y ago

I think these efforts need to be done at every level at the same time, and I agree that the "lower" or "earlier" levels need to be prioritized. Similar to how prevention is usually preferred to reaction.

morkalork 2y ago

You're absolutely correct and I think it's what drives all the resentment about DEI programs. People aren't dumb, when they see some group only makes up 3% of the population of engineers and they see a program trying to balance senior positions, they're going to feel its unfair bs. What's really interesting is that almost every woman I've worked with professionaly isn't from North America, they're all from India, Iran and Eastern Europe (Belarus, Bulgaria etc). There's something deeply wrong with the culture here that's screwing up the top of the funnel.

llamaimperative 2y ago
Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on down the funnel. There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes elsewhere in the system... obviously.
blitzar 2y ago
(~2018) In India, women represent 45% of total computer science enrollment in universities, almost three times the rate in the United States, where it is 18%.
- morkalork 2y ago
  And in Iran, it's even higher (1). It is not what you would expect from either country based on the stereotypes people have in their minds. (1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-take-over-tech-70-of-irans-science-and-engineering-students-are-women/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta...
  - iforgot22 2y ago
    The stereotype in my mind is that countries in Asia prioritize STEM a lot, so this makes sense to me. And they don't call it STEM, it's just school.

kevinh 2y ago

People oppose efforts to make changes at the other end of the funnel too. This is the most popular post about Girls Who Code (the first organization that comes to mind, why I searched it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431 You get similar complaints there.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
like_any_other 2y ago
That post is mostly factual observations, a reporting of lived experiences, if you will, not complaint.
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
There's a background assumption in this debate that society has a moral requirement to increase the representation of those who are underrepresented. I've never seen this assumption justified. What if it is actually fine for Asians to be under-represented in the NBA, and over-represented in software engineering?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- guax 2y ago
  I guess it depends a lot on the reason why they're under represented. Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense. I'm not so sure companies and schools are just passive in a cultural preference environment. And by not so sure I mean I am pretty confident there is tons of discrimination, I've seen it.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense UFC (and all other fighting sports) segment based on weight class. Plenty of flyweight fighters look scrawny when wearing a shirt. Also some of the most intense Muay Thai fighters I've ever sparred are skinny Thai guys from farming villages in Isaan who showed hallmarks of malnutrition (stunted height and extremely thin physique compared to Isaan Thai who grew up in BKK or even towns like Khon Kaen). And this brings up a good point - you need to make an effort to build a pipeline from an fairness standpoint. Not everyone has to be a SWE, but everyone should get an equal chance to try and become one. Plenty of kids end up in crap schools with few resources to succeed in a STEM major, or are limited by social or cultural norms from actually trying to major in STEM. This goes both ways - women and African Americans are underrepresented in CS. No way around that. It should be solved. Same way men are underrepresented in teaching and nursing, and it should be solved as well. This whole conversation around DEI became unneccesarily heated due to mutual political ambitions. At the end of the day, everyone should have a fair chance at trying an industry or field, and because the world isn't a fair playing field, it doesn't hurt to try and build an ecosystem by incentivizing a pipeline.

kenferry 2y ago

Mm. It’s certainly good to work at the other end of the funnel (thank you!) but it also won’t help address pattern matching that people do in hiring. It’s an incredibly natural thing for people to hire people like themselves, or people they meet their image of what a top notch software dev looks like. It requires active effort to counteract this. One can definitely argue about the efficacy of DEI approaches, but I disagree that JUST increasing the strength of applicants will address the issue.

subarctic 2y ago
Yes it will! That pattern matching is based on prior experience and if the entire makeup of candidates changes that'll cause people to pattern match differently. If old prejudices are taking a while to die out, it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
- joshuamorton 2y ago
  > it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!
  - deleted 2y ago
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- kenferry 2y ago
  That's an efficient market theory, and it's extremely optimistic about how real people work.
Manuel_D 2y ago
If the goal is to prevent people from being biased, why not anonymize candidate packets? Zoom interviews can also be anonymized easily. If it's the case that equally strong, or stronger, candidates are being passed over anonymization should solve this. Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.

specialp 2y ago

The start of the funnel is also the most racist and class discriminatory. Almost every school in the USA takes pupils from districts where the property owners pay the taxes for the schools. Rich areas get much more resources and support. Poor students get put into less funded schools and suffer from not having mentorship or peers to look up to. I live on Long Island and we have a majority white population. Despite that we have 2 school districts that are almost 100% black. That is where the problem is. You are not giving these students a chance. When I am going through resumes I am not getting a diverse pool of qualified candidates because these poor people have been historically oppressed into a caste of poor schooling and neighborhoods.

polski-g 2y ago
Most of what you said is just wrong. "Poor students" have the most support in the country: https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2024/are-poor-urban-districts-really-underfunded https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2024/are-poor-urban-districts-... Baltimore public schools get $30k per student. Carmel, IN public schools spend $10k per student. You should look into heritability. There is no longitudinal impact on adult outcomes as a result of parenting/schooling practices.
- jyounker 2y ago
  I'm assuming you are not familiar with this study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_0416.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04... It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school district to a richer school district, and they have children under 13, then those children are significantly more successful than children whose families remain in the poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be a slight negative effect. There are other studies showing similar effedcts. Summary: It's not genetics.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    A lot of that has to do with who your kid goes to school with. If we take equally funded schools (in WA that’s easy since education is primarily funded by the state), the results are still different: districts with richer families do better probably because they get more support at home, but even lower income students do better since they feel like they need to keep up with their classmates.

whimsicalism 2y ago

i think that i've seen in my lifetime AA in hiring absolutely translate to shifts in undergrad composition. not sure if it spills over to highschool, but it definitely does when people are choosing what to do in college.

gorgoiler 2y ago
In my experience girls want to do CS but they lack confidence and are given too many opportunities to opt for something easier where they think they’ll be more successful. (I don’t know about any other of the diversity axes as much.)
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  interesting. not going to comment too much on this, but this idea would seemingly be belied by the well-known STEM gender-equality paradox.

draw_down 2y ago

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golly_ned 2y ago

Just noting for those interested to check out Microsoft TEALS.

JofArnold 2y ago

I definitely recognize what you're saying and it's fantastic, but hiring managers and execs do indeed need to be active on this too. The channels to reach out to more diverse candidate are more often than not different to those recruiters use to find your "average white guy in a hoodie". That's decreasingly the case for women (and I use that term very intentionally; I'm not talking generally "non-male" here), but social media and professional networking is quite hostile and/or intimidating to other groups. While the business benefits of putting in this extra effort in are obvious (it's a no brainer to seek out overlooked top talent, let alone the benefits of culture and diverse experiences), those benefits aren't always aligned with the hiring team who are incentivized in most companies to hit numbers. The business goals need to be driven from above by DEI initiatives or - if not - hiring manager allies who'll put their foot down.

danny_codes 2y ago

Completely agree. IMO we should start with paid maternity/paternity leave, childcare subsidies, and free Pre-K. Just get things started on the right foot. I think we're the only developed country without paid maternity leave. It's pathetic.

Chilko 2y ago

I totally agree. At the previous company I worked for, we decided to sponsor a 3-year scholarship (paid directly to the student, not just covering fees) at a local uni that targeted high-school leavers from demographics that were underrepresented in both our company and the wider industry we were in (renewables/energy sector). Trying to hire more people from those demographics is futile if the candidates don't exist, so the idea was to encourage people to choose this pathway. The scholarship is for students who would choose a certain program/specialization relevant for our industry and includes a paid summer internship at our company after their 2nd or 3rd year of study. Having mentored some of these students when they were interns (capable and bright students with promising futures), they said that this scholarship helped them choose this career path whereas otherwise they may have just tried to get into tech like many others at that university. Note this was not in the USA but in New Zealand where we have a different colonial history we are reckoning with. The scholarship targeted women, Maori (our indigenous culture), and Pacific Islanders (a large ethnic minority in NZ). This less about meeting any ratios or quotas (we didn't have those), but rather we felt a distinct lack of e.g. Maori voices in our company and the industry which is a problem when you are frequently interacting with Maori stakeholders and landowners in energy project development (and indigenous relations and historical landonwership plays a large role in our consenting & planning process).