You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

It's not an issue of 'explaining' the odds. It's an issue of women knowing that they're worth something in and of themselves, competing against men who are motivated by a lifetime of experience telling that if they can't achieve, they are nothing.

not exactly. The numbers show that women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing, but they do not show why that happens.

Is it because women are more lazy, less motivated or crack more frequently under pressure?

Who knows.

And this doesn't have to be just women, it could be anyone with a genetic or cultural predisposition (reducing diversity at least in personality types). Lot's of selection for monoculture here.

Now that's an important fact that tends to get overlooked. Ninety-nine percent of the agitation about increasing "representation" tends to focus on accusing everyone of misogyny and attempting to destroy existing culture. But increasing the confidence level of female applicants, so they aren't put off by immediate rejection, could be a much less destructive way of achieving the goal.

Maybe, just maybe, women don't want all of that, and we're collectively pushing them (in the name of equality of outcome) to something they don't care for? If you look at the stats, women in more egalitarian societies (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) are much less likely to choose IT over less egalitarian ones.

For reference, what is this saying about how many of those that stop practicing are men?

7 times more likely than what? I haven't read the article yet. Any given individual is how likely to 'stop practicing' after a rejection? 10% if man, 70% if woman? 1% if man, 7% if woman?

That's getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. The real key here is to fix the interviewing process, like the article said. Quit with the cargo-cult technical questions that don't mean anything, and just _talk_ to people.

And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE.

When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks.

Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a Norwegian documentary on this, in 8 parts, and it is well worth a watch.

I am no expert, maybe it has something to do with maternity leave regimes or the interviews (like OP mentions)?

Situation with lack of female developers is not US-specific. I went to college in Ukraine, of ~100 sudents on computer science faculty, less than 10 were woman.

This in particular is the concept of a "model minority".

Culture difference cannot explain why women are not well represented in tech.

Culture difference can be a part of systemic bias, anyway. Let's say you have some programming job. The interviews focus on questions about frobbing linked lists (which is often the case). Now, it turns out that people from demographic A are more likely to focus on these questions when practicing for interviews, whereas demographic B focuses on honing the skill set they need for the actual job (algorithmy linked list stuff may not be necessary at all!).

You'd say that it's not possible for /culture/ to change how you study. There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills. This stems from the general culture of finding and using a formulaic method of succeeding at academics. I don't like this culture (it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic), and always have spoken out against it, but it's there.

But, you say, that's a different country, what about a minority demographic within the same country? Firstly, minorities more often than not are segregated into their own communities (socially, if not physically) due to various voluntary and involuntary reasons, and the effect can be the same as being in a different country (albeit milder).

Now realize that an interviewer will probably design questions around the kind that they are used to and that they (and their peers) would do well with. This is an unconscious bias -- interview questions are more often than not tests of how similar you are to the (often non-diverse) peer group of the interviewer, and not actually a test of how good you are as a candidate. This is an association fallacy, "all people like my peer group are good programmers, hence all good programmers are like my peer group". Of course, interviewing is often about avoiding bad programmers much more than it is about hiring good ones -- generally folks are okay with accidentally not hiring a good programmer, but want to avoid hiring a bad one at all costs. Thus tweaking your interview process to target a subset of the set of all good programmers isn't that bad, is it? Except that this targeting carries an unconscious bias inside it, and unfairly ends up disproportionately excluding minorities. If you're going to use a process prone to false negatives on purpose, be damn sure that the likelihood of someone being a false negative is in no way correlated with the demographic they are from. You may not have designed the process with this correlation in mind (hence, "unconscious bias"), but this bias is still there.

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And it doesn't have to be culture differences. You have a lot of other behavioral differences due to economic status or demographic which are unconsciously excluded in interviews. E.g. women are less likely to apply for jobs where they do not have all the listed qualifications, but men are very likely to apply, and get hired, because not all the qualifications were necessary anyway. The fix here is to be clear on what you absolutely need in a candidate, and what would be "nice to have".

And it doesn't have to be behavioral differences either. Sometimes it has to do with defining your inputs. Many companies focus on hiring from a set of people which itself is biased. It can be by hiring only from certain colleges (and then inexplicably whining about the "pipeline" -- you chose the pipeline!). It can be from having unconscious or conscious discrimination against autodidacts. Or code bootcamp folks. If you restrict your inputs to an already biased source, you will get biased results.

There are tons and tons of articles and papers out there about this. These aren't unknown effects. They're well established.

None of this is on purpose, of course (at least, I hope it isn't!). But it's still a bias, even if it's unconscious. And the onus is on the creators of the bias to fix it.

There are a million reasons out there why various demographics aren't well-represented in tech. It's just lazy to blame it on the demographics and say "it's cultural differences" without realizing the mistakes made by tech cos in making culture a factor in the first place.

This reveals a complete misunderstanding of how "systemic bias" occurs and persists.

[Edited with further thoughts]

"Cultural differences" don't just appear out of nowhere. Culture itself is an amalgamation of different human experiences that have combined and recombined over tens of thousands of years. It's not static. The things you deem "cultural differences" have many causes, and "differences" can and do change all the time.

When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation.

"Systemic bias" may or may not exist in this case, but if you think cultural differences themselves can't lead to systemic bias then you are mistaken.

Here's a question: if there's such a demand for solutions that solve a problem that the "majority" can't see, why don't women and minorities just start their own companies to solve those problems and make piles of $$$?

Reality check: building a good team is a struggle for every race, culture, gender, and individual in every industry on the planet. I get it though, it's a lot easier to mooch off of actual engineers who build solutions and then act like they had some significant impact as the "Director of Diversity".

Keep riding those coat-tails, maybe one day you will invent something on your own that isn't pseudo-scientific bullshit and actually improves people's lives. Go on, I DARE you to run your own startup and actually try to hire good help. You'll quickly find you have no time for such nonsense and only care about getting $*!@& done.

I saw a really good write up (I think on here) where they basically did a initial "are you an idiot?" round of interviews and then contracted every person that they thought might be a viable (not good just viable) candidate with a small piece of software for 2 weeks. This amounted to 3 candidates IIRC the TL;DR was that the person they thought was least likely to perform knocked their socks off. The one that crushed the interview asked for more time and then just fell of the radar. The technical code test and trick question interview is a tired fingerprint of the industry. Honestly if one cannot spot technical talent by having a 30 minute conversation with a person, they may want to reassess where they think they are in their own technical and managerial skills, because they may want to reflect the possibility that they are engaging in a weiner waving contest as opposed to an interview, to stroke their own ego.

How is knowing the very basics of CS a way to show-off? It should be requisite shouldn't it?

That said, I agree with the degeneration to arms race. I'm awaiting an interview question on Shor's algorithm. "We like to be ready for whatever the future may bring here at LolCorp."

Other industries have higher costs for employment and pay less.

For example, teachers often have to spend thousands of dollars out of pocket to take tests to get various levels of certification just to start teaching.

I'm afraid our industry is moving in the same direction.

It will start becoming more and more expensive just to get the damn job. It's already hard enough.

Soon all costs of training an employee will be pushed off onto the employee themselves. "You must be able to jump this high (and spent $$$) to work here."

(Though there are Dutch companies that abuse it by extending temporary contracts without ever giving a permanent contract, and sometimes even let good employees go because they don't want to give them a permanent contract.)

Now, you can try to get around this by a real trial period (either contract-to-hire, or being super clear that the trial period is actually a trial period) - if you fire an employee of a obviously lower class, employees of the higher classes won't be as disturbed as if you fired one of their peers, but then you have the contract-to-hire problem, which is that people will usually choose a job perceived to be long-term with a low risk of being fired over any sort of 'trial period' - a large portion of your top applicants will turn the job down if they have to spend time as a lower-tier of employee first.

> It takes a lot of interviews to get used to the process and the format and to understand that the stuff you do in technical interviews isn’t actually the stuff you do at work every day. And it takes people in your social circle all going through the same experience, screwing up interviews here and there, and getting back on the horse to realize that poor performance in one interview isn’t predictive of whether you’ll be a good engineer.

If you don't have friends in the industry and you don't have the time and money to go interview at 10 different places, 1 or 2 failed algorithms interviews can be very discouraging and might convince you that you're not cut out for this industry. In fact the "Poor performances hit marginalized groups the hardest" section has actual data showing that women are much more likely to stop trying after 1 or 2 failed interviews.

1) Working on algorithm problem requires very little in common between interviewer and interviewee. I'm C++/C#, I won't be able to give Ruby dev a real world task and evaluate it properly. Algo/data structure problems are universal and looks similar in any language. In my practice I completely failed to make any conclusions by talking about previous experience. It was not clear to me what person actually did vs what was already on the project, may as well just fixed couple UI bugs on the complex project. This part might be might personal failure as interviewer, but it was it is, and I've seen enough developers with years of experience who barely code. So unfortunately having great resume doesn't prove anything.

2) Everyone knows that big tech companies ask these questions. Knowing that you didn't take to prepare, says one of two things to me: you don't find it interesting topic/usefull or you don't have enough grit to go thru that. When I prepared for the interview I went thru two algo books, it took some time but it was easy for me, I did enjoy the learning part, yes it's not something I use every day. But learning things is a trait of good developer, knowing fundamentals if part of that. Some folks found it useless, but since it's known fact that's being asked on interiewes, motivated developer would spend time and learn it. Over the years at work, we have to learn things that are not interesting and that I'd rather choose not to know at all, same as algorithms to some people. If you can't make yourself learn algorithms to pass interview, likely you wont learn things for the work too.

The stuff people complain about (big O, data structures, algorithms in theory) are stuff even us with degrees have to study and relearn before job interviews. I think you might be underselling yourself. Those big companies use questions like this (often instead of hard checks for degrees) specifically to allow self-taught coders who are good an opportunity to get in.

To some extent, as other have posted, it is kind of silly, but you might be able to look at it as a leveling of the playing field.

> I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up.

It's not--it's a metric for determining unsuitability.

Well, they're far from the ones with the hardest interviews.

They probably _also_ feel like it's right. This is one of those social problems where both the business need and moral need match up.

My guess is that people who want racial diversity want class diversity, diversity of thought, cultural diversity, etc. These are not exclusive problems. In fact, if we got to a world state where race played no part in someone's job opportunities, I expect it would be easier to tackle the others.

Nah man. Even a half-honest business person will tell you the business incentive for making and funding diversity goals is about expanding the hiring pool.

The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. Maybe the businesses are true believers in diversity, or maybe they're cold, calculating, and just hiring the true believers to diversify their business.

It's like when Google lobbies the government and their goals happen to overlap with ends an everyday engineer clued into the topic also likes. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. But they'll make the strong principled argument for it.

Should it follow the local area's racial distribution, especially if that is divergent from the national averages?

In any case, one pro-diversity argument is that across cultures and genders lie different ways of looking at the world and looking at problems. This adds more potential good solutions to the discovery space your workers are exploring.

However, I think underlying these movements is that companies desperately do not want to be viewed as socially offensive, to avoid being in the crosshairs of devastating angry mob backlashes.

Of course, there's also something to be said about the lack of diversity in the pool of software engineer candidates, which signals a problem for the industry in general for the same reasons. That's e.g. why tech companies are funding programs so that girls aren't turned off a software career if that's what they fancy.

Those details aside, in general my impression is that the industry isn't currently in any sort of stagnation of opportunities, with employees' salaries racing to the bottom to cling on those opportunities. On the opposite, there seems to be plenty of things still to be done, and not enough hands. If you dump a lot of new good candidates in the pool, they're going to be absorbed right away, even if they're all white American males.

1. That the candidate pool matches the general population.

2. That the company is discriminating against this candidate pool, leading to skewed demographics.

For some reason, assumption (1) seems to be implicitly trusted, and all blame fall to assumption (2) -- that is, that any deviation from the general population is somehow the fault of the company. I would posit that assumption (1) is typically not true. For instance, we know from studies that the STEM candidate pool for women is smaller than the general population, due to university dropout. It is impossible for every STEM company to have a population distribution of women that matches the general population. Reverse applies to, say, nursing or teaching, which have larger-than-expected numbers of women. (I'll leave it to the reader to make their own conclusions about why we aren't reading about diversity problems in such fields.)

In any case, I think it's worth to look at it and try to solve it, because maybe you end up improving the actual/future employees' life and the company itself.

And possibly race is not the only division to look at, as you say. Class is probably more interesting, but also age, family responsibilities or sexual orientation can reveal practices/attitudes that can be improved.

I agree with you in the cynical thinking and in the motivations of some of the groups pushing for it, but I think that in the long run thinking about the diversity problem and trying to fix it can lead to better outcomes for everybody.

Too many underrepresented groups would be a nicer way of putting it.

> Should it follow the US racial distribution?

Would that not be fairest?

> Since race is only skin deep

It's about institutionalized racism, so race is what we should be looking at.

Besides, your idea wouldn't be that interesting considering how underrepresented women are regardless of race.

That said, folks at Google are putting a ton of effort and resources into diversity initiatives. But not at the expense of revamping the current process.

I'm not saying stop people doing it, but I'm not sure encouraging more high risk taking amongst the most vulnerable is wise.

But I agree with your central idea - diversity of options, beacuse diversity, to me, is not forcing every environment to be as diverse as possible, it is about a diversity in the cultural landscape. As a reductio ad absurdum analogy, diversity isn't forcing mosques to server beer and bacon and forcing pubs to have alcohol and pig free sections, it is having a world where there are both Mosques and pubs, and we can all choose what we prefer.

Well america is 12.6% black, so perhaps that is perfectly representative.

Programming technical interviews are not supposed to be like that. They're supposed to be some mixture of a relevant-ish skills test and a plausibly-deniable IQ test. (One constraint here is that anything which is overtly an IQ test will make the company's lawyers get twitchy and start nervously trying to remember the details of the Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co.)

"Being good at technical interviews" is not the same thing as "being a good programmer". You can be bad at interviews but good at programming. You can be good at interviews but bad at programming. Turns out that there's a correlation between the former set and certain demographics, because of unconscious biases in the interview process.

The interview doesn't have to be all whiteboard coding but I want to at least feel like the person got some grasp of my technical ability. If the entire thing is basically a "personality interview" I start to think that it is very possible technically weak people may have been able to schmooze their way into a place in the company and I'd prefer to not work with a high ratio of bozos.

It is amazingly easy for BS artists to look good on references, credentials, and their presented track record. And yet fail fizzbuzz.

Your credentials might speak for themselves. After all, you've been working for 30 years. 80% of the people I've hired have between 0 and 5 years work experience and without a technical screening I might as well just give them the job based on dice roll.

Usually I don't check credentials, and only use a resume to make a selection but don't use it _at all_ to determine if you're a good candidate after you've come in for an interview.

You know what's honest and true? Put someone in a room and talk to them, and see how they react to a situation and perform. See what they can figure out from first principles. Strong performance in these situations (problem solving, i.e. reasoning from first principles) correlates very well in my experience with strong performance on the job as a software engineer.

2. Do you think you might have sold yourself short? In other words, if you had practiced one of these do you think you might have ended up in a place which you enjoyed more?

The premise of question 2 is that the interview process does not represent the job or company. In many cases, I think this premise is valid.

But I'd never go with references and credentials on their own. On one side, that allows bluffers and bullshitters in. And on the other, it excludes people who would be perfectly good, but either aren't good at selling themselves or don't yet have a track record.

The notable exception to this thinking is in established firms where there is a specific methodology and persona they wish all employees to have. Ex. the major consultancies, law firms, investment banks, etc. For them, it's generally best to pick a completely fresh person (new grad) and mold them into exactly what the company wants without having to "undo" things they may have learned elsewhere.

If the pay dropped, I have a strong feeling that the calls for increased diversity in tech would cease quickly, replaced with complaints about diversity in accountancy or some other high net worth career.

But lets say that isn't a compelling argument for you. Our industry has a disastrous success rate. Something is wrong. Most software is not getting written correctly, on time, or on budget. On top of this, it is nearly impossible to fill positions with qualified applicants.

Given that, there is a pretty strong argument that we should change the way we hire software developers and an obvious way to change it is to be more inclusive. If the current population isn't getting the job done, lets open the population up to others.

[1] Nurse and Midwife - Registration Data - June 2016, page 10 http://www.nursingmidwiferyboard.gov.au/About/Statistics.asp...

Have you tried looking, before just assuming that such things don't already exist?

I mean, a simple Google search will find plenty of industry groups, in multiple countries, dedicated to supporting women in all of those industries. They encourage women to pursue careers in those industries, do advocacy and education, and work with the industry to try to fix the problems that cause the lack of women in those industries. This is true for pretty much every industry that was traditionally male-dominated.

Same goes for men in traditionally female-dominated industries.

None of these efforts are as high profile as business or tech. Doesn't mean they don't exist.

I'm all in for as many people to do the job as possible regardless of race, creed, sex or colour.

There are of course many PC-police types who can't give a clear reason why we should pay attention to diversity, but there are good reasons nonetheless.

Given that we're talking about "tech", I think your argument would be stronger if you used examples where physical strength is seldom an important factor in job-performance.

Those other blue-collar traditionally masculine jobs have a hard dependency on brute strength that most women can't satisfy. Physiology is almost as cruel a mistress as physics.

BS, that's a dodge. I've seen plenty of people (regardless of their background, ethnicity, or gender) who've been screwed by the system and have spent way too long in crappy jobs where they were unable to make much of a difference. Some people get lucky and early on they find jobs where their talent can shine through and they get on a train that just keeps going up. Other folks may have things line up for them that way only much later in their career, yet others maybe not at all. And if the less lucky decide to switch careers instead of continue struggling and getting frustrated with their ambitions being constantly thwarted then you may never know the potential that was lost from that change of careers. I've also known many extremely talented developers who happened to stumble into the career by accident, and if even some small thing had been different along the way they would have been doing something else.