Hacker News Reader

Comment by bl4ckm0r3 | Hacker News Reader

As an engineer working in silicon valley, I have definitely seen a lower bar for female engineers interviews because companies are trying to catch up on the gender divide in their 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. It is also true that there is a bias in the industry, but I don't think this approach is helping at all, if nothing people think women deserve it even less... I believe men and women are equal in terms of capabilities and skills, but giving away jobs to a minority (women in this case) isn't the right way to make them gain the respect they deserve or block/control the bias against them.

View on HN

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).

This is consistent with what I've experienced hiring newer / junior devs. However, because we didn't have any female developers, we were more likely to offer interviews to females who sent in resumes, but they were asked the same questions we asked everyone else.

And did you judge them with the same standards? Give them the same tasks and same support as their male counterparts?

Who's "them" in this case?

I think it's important to respect everyone. Part of respect is fair treatment.

Yes, the coding challenges and interviews are the same. But they are graded differently even before the packet is seen by the hiring committee.

I've talked to many interviewers at my company, and many people talk about how they bump up the score of "diversity candidates" even though management says that we don't lower the bar. This is talked about openly.

I've only seen this at a Bay Area company. Other companies I have worked at have had a very strong stance against using race or gender as a basis of making hiring decisions.

It's also the case that the hiring pipelines can be biased in other ways. For instance if a woman fails a phone screen she may be given a second phone screen anyway, or even on-sites anyway, "just in case", whereas the man would have been canned at the first stage. Was definitely told this was happening by recruiters in the past.

Interesting. We have done that for people of any gender in grad programs before when hiring for targeted roles suited for their specialty, but not to my knowledge for candidates by gender.

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.

Maybe top tech companies don't actually care what you wear to your interview? Maybe the "girls" were better whiteboard coders than the "male students"?

I know it doesn't fit your world view. I'm sorry. They aren't. I've been on teams with both parties. Companies had mentioned dress code for the interviews. You would think punctuality would be important, especially for an interview?

They were filling quotas. Unlucky.

You sure this is a top tech company? What top tech company mentions dress code (beyond something like "don't worry about it")?

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.

Wasn't specifically talking about facebook, more of a generic situation here. You can't attract good female talents, if you don't have female devs in your company. Also in the market there are a lot of junior candidates (and a lot of them coming from a different background and just trying to land a job that will allow them to live in san francisco). It is easy to blame sexism (riding the wave now) when it may just be that some code isn't good... At least according to this article the bias has more to do with the experience of some coder.

https://news.fastcompany.com/at-facebook-women-coders-are-ju...

This kinds really messes with candidates brains in a way. A descent coder I know gets a billion interview requests in linkedin but after completing a number of loops she got all rejects. She now firmly believes she doesn't get accepted coz she's not a male.

There's only so many rejects you can get before you say "fuck it! I'm gonna choose another career path, this was a waste of time, money and energy"

It's hard to keep the bar equal when some candidates are treated as higher value, especially considering if you're putting women at the top of your funnel you can be sure Google is too.

It's not that hard.

Hiring managers / hiring committees for technical positions at the big-5 are made up of peer engineers and managers (not recruiters or executives). So they hire the best person for the job because they're likely to be working alongside.

I haven't come across situations where there are direct diversity incentives at the point where the hiring decision is made. Sure, there's probably indirect incentives, but I don't think they're as strong as your suggesting.

And engineers are free of bias? You know the candidate is a desirable hire and will receive competing offers because of their gender (rightly or wrongly).

> 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".

There definitely is a bias in the industry that we should work to remove.

> couldn't land a job as an engineer in one of the large tech companies without a degree or significant experience.

I have seen and met people that prove the opposite. But yeah every generalization has intrinsic errors.

The number of people trying to change career through bootcamp is insanely huge, I think they aren't good enough to qualify people (compared to university or relevant experience) and I think it shows. If you see the stats, around 40% of people that do bootcamps are female (despite the much lower number in the industry), and I am sure part of them lands jobs (I have interviewed a lot, and have seen some of them land job in the big companies) and have a hard time getting at the same level of degree/experienced people.

I think for a big company (with the huge amount of female they need to fill the gap) it's safer to hire, and invest in formation than find a good experienced female engineer (which honestly are a bit rare...since the industry forgot about them for about 20 years).

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'm not sure why we should assume that lowering the bar is even in the best interest of the women/minorities.

If I was hired for a position I that I wasn't qualified enough to get myself, I would likely not perform as well, and I'd become disheartened, and would be more likely to quit.

For example, race-based affirmative action for law school admits students to schools they otherwise wouldn't get admitted to. Although it is a good gesture, the students end up much worse off because they pass the bar at a much lower rate and end up with student loans they can't afford.

I'm pretty sure everything you could ever want to learn to be a good engineer is out there on the internet for you to be read for free. Ranging from entire degree courses, to giant open source projects and even blog posts on how to get hired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com