Facebook's female engineers claim gender bias

I've never seen suggestions that Facebook has a lower hiring bar for females, and i'd be really surprised if this was the case.

The playbook is to aggressively attract female (and other diversity) candidates into the top of the hiring funnel, but keep the hiring bar equal.

Source - I used to be a hiring manager at a similar large-cap tech company.

> You can land a job almost everywhere with almost no knowledge if you are a jr female developer, which is not true for men.

Not only do I find that unlikely, I would say that it's blatantly false since you most certainly (AFAIK) couldn't land a job as an engineer in one of the large tech companies without a degree or significant experience.

Far more likely is that women who become developers, because of the state of the industry, on average are more employable since they are likely to have more formal education and skills that the industry lacks. But wouldn't necessarily recognized as such by other developers because they aren't seen as "cool hackers".

As someone who has hired both males and females for junior and senior engineering positions at several companies, what you are saying is not the case.

The coding challenges and interviews are the same. The decisions of hiring committees I have been on have been actually in general weighted toward white men with experience more often than not, because many of the women I'm seeing are just out of school or with a little experience (which says good things about the future assuming they stick around).

However, I have seen race/gender used as the deciding factor between two candidates who are in all other ways equally excellent and suited for the role (that is, pick the candidate who is not a white male out of two whose skills and resumes and interview performance are equal).

From one perspective, the bar should be lowered. Lowering the bar is acknowledgement of discriminatory practices towards opportunity. How can a black person study if he is banned from a library? Similary, a hostile and overly macho tech culture can diasadvantage women from learning. Especially if the learning is not from books but from other people/men. (Which is the majority of info needed to succeed in a workplace. The majority of needed info is NOT book smarts but relationship gated info and privileges)

So the existence of an entry bar exists only because of a lack of mentorship culture out of gated access to information. In school, something i've seen is terrible TAs explaining things purposefully convolutedly to "haze" newcomers.

The give and take aspect with all information, including programming knowledge is fundamental. For men, it revolves around mutual respect, but men almost seem to want something from women before dolling out any infor whatsoever. The most minimum of which is being friendly and nice in a "I heard you're the awesome expert to ask about this, ur so great! I hope you can teach me! :)". While the requirement for men is to not be an asshole. "Hey, can you explain this?"

I've seen this first hand. When people where interviewing for work experience during college, a very lucrative top tech company hired two girls who had bad grades, no side projects and wore very VERY casual attire to their interviews. One was even late. Two other male students also had been interviewed. Both had very high grades, worked on side projects etc. and weren't socially inept.

Will the industry just accept that the majority of women are just not interested? Companies are running special events for women compsci students only.

Sick of this notion that we can achieve equality by excluding men.

When I was doing a lot of code reviews all I wanted was team members I could trust -- somebody who could sit down, hack out a feature, and I just had to hit the merge button. Every single comment I made was more time out of my day. It sounds like a massive cultural problem if it's that hard to get code merged.

> Examples include: - having to chase down specific individuals and sit down with them to walk them through my code review - waiting for approvals on code reviews while other engineers, not wanting to be blocked on my work, copy and paste my code directly into their branches and open new code reviews which have no problem getting approvals

That's crazy! I'd be escalating that shit to my manager in the first day it happened. Management should sort out any individuals that have a problem. I can't understand why a company would hire an engineer _not_ to do work.

I once worked at a "hot" tech company that had a formal policy where HR had to get involved before rejecting a borderline candidate if they were female. It was a shame -- up until that point there were few female engineers but they were all brilliant. After that policy was implemented you had to wonder which were the token hires.

There has been a research on unconscious bias towards minorities. Basically given the same papers, the number of corrections and comments was significantly higher when the papers had names of minorities or something. That kind of ironically proves that it's beneficial to hire more women given the same qualifications, doesn't it? haha. People would look at women's code much more carefully and there will be fewer bugs in the end. I personally had a few cases where I just copied an approach of some guy (e.g. using a certain library that a similar application was using) but I had to change that during the code review. I mentioned this and had to change his code as well. How did he get through this rigorous code review in the first place? I don't know. Maybe people found him more trust-worthy and assumed his work was perfect. :/

HOW DARE YOU IMPLY THAT WOMEN KNOW LESS THAN MEN! /s

This is bound to happen when you focus more on core business goals and spend too much time talking about diversity.

Right, it would be great if we could see the ("anonymized") dataset.

What about this smells like bad stats to you? Given that the answer to at least one of your questions is in the article (or easily searchable online if you don't have wsj access), it seems like maybe you are assuming it is bad stats because you don't like the conclusion?

To me the engineer's study uses data that should be free from obvious bias (duration at facebook) while the company study uses data that one might expect to exhibit the same bias as that they are intending to study (promotion decisions and code review decisions). While there are undoubtedly improvements that could be done with more data or more time, I would be inclined to take the results at face value rather than assuming something must be wrong.

Ready for there to be a whole bunch of comments about how it's easier to get hired as female engineer because of diversity quotas...

>please recognize the determination it takes to make it that far.

Why do you say this? Isn't it more likely that many women prefer to take on the role of a mother, and if they've been in a high paid engineering position they likely have a partner who can provide for both of them while they raise children.

Slaving away at an engineering career doesn't seem all that appealing after you've had the rewarding experience of raising your children.

Can I get this recognition if I get into nursing?

This only matters if the different skill distributions would make it likely that a lesser-skilled candidate does not meet the standards needed to produce good code at that level. In my experience this is not the case. When you are hiring for one of the big-5, the candidates that make it through the first-pass screening by the recruiters are usually people who any other company would hire on the spot. When you get down to making a decision among the top few from any crop of candidates it really is a coin flip.

Every engineer at Facebook likes to think that they are there because they are 'the best of the best', but having sat through far more hiring reviews at Facebook than I ever thought I would have to put up, with the simple fact is that for every person you see walking around the campus there were two or three other people who the job offer could have just as easily gone to were it not for a whole host of non-code/non-dev reasons; these reasons can range from gender to the sloppy handwriting on the whiteboard to the fact that when I came in to do your manager interview I happened to be a little annoyed that the cafe had run out of lox for my morning bagel.

In my experience, the least qualified female engineers I encountered were more qualified than the lower quartile of male engineers and they worked a hell of a lot harder to boot.

I've found the female/nb developers that I've encountered tend to be extremely talented/above average developers, so I don't think this is as much of an issue as you think.

I suspect it has something to do with the people willing to navigate what is generally a field somewhat hostile to women and gender non-conforming people being particularly interested in the field and dedicated to working hard in it.

> If Facebook is attempting to meet diversity quotas, which certainly exist, by pulling from a limited pool of qualifying candidates, in some scenarios, they will necessarily need to employ lower qualified candidates.

You make it sound like existing hiring practices find the best candidates, but we know that they don't. We know traditional hiring practices are bullshit.

> This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it is a valid question.

You didn't actually ask a question in that comment.

Most code review is not that anonymous. You often talk in person or similar about code and your identity is going to come out. These engineering organizations are the size of villages at most, it's hard to avoid.

Not a female but I've experienced similar bias. I was in a big 5 Co and a project had a number of Indian outsourced testers. Even though I was a dev who contributed equal to others I was seen as a second class citizen doing mostly simple html/css work.

I just got frustrated one day and switched teams. New team was much better at treating me like a peer. It was a smaller team so there were a ton of opportunities to grab more responsibilities.

May be you should look into a smaller team where you can have more ownership and larger impact.

Now I'm at a startup and I absolutely love it.

> Growth - I cared less about growth as far as I had a decent salary to live with. I am someone who likes to work for the challenges I can solve and not for the minor salary increases or bonuses. May sound stupid

Is that a gender bias? I had this issue myself, being an introvert and generally hating any conflict. I had to train myself to play the game.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, but not sure It's the company putting down one gender. Louder people tend to move up.

"Being told that I work like a senior engineer and if I do more work, I'll get the promotion next year."

My f'ing God, This. A thousand times this.

10 years I've been working as a junior f'ing programmer doing senior (and above) level work and roles. Every review is glowing. Every manager fights to have me on their team. I jave engineers under me. I mentor all the new hires. I am go to for all questions.

When it comes time for a promotion.. Suddenly I need to do more of something. They can never define what that something is, but i can forget ever being promoted.

I'm so close to saying screw it and quitting. Being talked over, interrupted, not having my ideas taken seriously until a male parrots them, being micromanaged, having my accompliahments dismissed while lesser accomplishments by males are lauded.

If i didnt love this work so much, I wouldve quit 5 years ago. Being a woman in tech sucks balls. I was a LCpl in the Marines and faced less sexism and animosity than i have in the tech field.

I completely belive the findings by these women are real and accurate. Too many other fields have proven the same scenarios exist.

Hi,

I'm also a big HN fan and I've been lurking around here for the last 10 years. Start your own firm, go get VC, someone will fund you. If you are at a well known company now someone will fund you.

Otherwise, expect more of the same for the next 20 years. I doubt anything will change. At least if you run your own firm you can work very cleverly, and over time build up $$ from equity in your own projects. Trust me, you will learn much more and faster at your own startup.

That article has been thoroughly disproven on multiple sites, multiple times.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...

You can skip the paywall through facebook. Append the article url to the end of this:

https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=

That feeling of being "insufficiently nerdy" and the mild paranoia that arises from being subconsciously labelled as such by your peers is one of many things I've learned to deal with on a daily basis. I'm certain there are many others that can relate. I think part of the problem is that we don't have these empathy-building conversations at work, which is a shame because there is evidence that empathy towards teammates is part of building successful teams[1].

In general, I wish we would stop framing discussions of improving diversity in tech as a zero-sum game in which the collective experience of one group is by default more valid than the collective experience of another group. Bad hiring heuristics and mental shortcuts for what makes a person a good engineer hurt everyone who gets eliminated from contention before being given a chance to do the job, not just the person who checks off the most boxes on the EEOC reporting section of the job application.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...