Hacker News Reader

Comment by jomamaxx | Hacker News Reader

"It’s important to me that recruiters and interviewers are respectful. Nothing is worse than a condescending interviewer."

What does this have to do with 'female'? This is the norm in high tech for everyone - sadly.

Am I under the impression that this girl thinks that she's being singled out as a girl on this? Because I got it most of the time during my career. Not saying it's right, but I don't think it's a gender issue.

View on HN

My understanding is that this article series is not about experiences that are uniquely female. Rather, it's just generally about the experiences of female engineers. Many experiences are likely to be the same as for a male engineer, but not all. I really like this approach, as I think it makes it easier to understand their perspective.

Yes that's exactly it. Glad you like the approach.

Because interviewers are more likely to be condescending to someone they don't respect, and many of them don't respect women.

Yes, this stuff happens to many people, not just women. But it happens to them on an alarmingly regular basis.

That's the extreme case, but there is also the less malicious one where because of stereotypes and average distributions at a particular company, people just assume women they are speaking to to be less technical than they are and try to 'helpfully' explain things at an unnecessarily basic level. Say, a system's engineer explaining their work to a female college as if she were a front end developer by default, where they would ask a male college what their experience was before making that assumption.

This is an easy mistake to make if you are a kernel hacker in an organization that has, say 20% female developers overall, but where only 2% of kernel hackers are women. Easy to make, not malicious, but not much less annoying because of it, specially if you are the 10th person to assume that. From your point of view, it is a very efficient cache prediction strategy, since you'll get it right 90% of the time[1], but from theirs, it means half their queries end up miss-predicted...

[1] Yes, I am assuming 50% of all developers are kernel hackers, you can switch to something more realistic like product vs infra, front vs backend, etc. Also, the point is not about "lower-level systems programming being real-er programming!", but about making assumptions based partly on gender.

Think about what you just said about assumptions and how that dovetails with lack of respect. GP didn't suggest said lack of respect was necessarily malicious. Just that it exists and is uncomfortable. How does a perception being the result of stereotyping make it any more excusable?

First of all, I agree with the GP and I am emphatically agreeing with you here that such stereotyping is uncomfortable, unneeded and something that urgently needs to go away. But it is still somewhat different from fully dismissing someone as 'less than' because of gender, and the later (appallingly) still happens.

In some circles, you will get people who think along the lines of "yeah, of course there is sexism in industry, I mean, look at Bob, he keeps cracking jokes about women and browses The Red Pill at work. But I am not like Bob, I don't have anything against women, I am trying to help, ergo I can't be sexist". Yet these people can be condescending without generally meaning to disrespect or make less on anyone. When confronted with a woman who is very technical and assertive about that fact, they quickly adjust to treat her as technical, but their default assumption still goes to 'relatively less technical than me' when meeting any new female developer (and doesn't when meeting a male college). I was trying to point out that sort of thing is a problem too.

Almost 100% of the interviews I've had in tech in business were borderline condescending, and I'm a dude.

I would suggest this has nothing to do with gender, and that wanting 'less condescending interviews' is merely a gripe about the current state of the entire economy. Not only is it not tech specific, it's not even industry or nation specific.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com