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Comment by leshow | Hacker News Reader

Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

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that's not quite the cobra effect. For that the number of female developers would need to have been reduced and not code quality.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring?

To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.

You can still lower the bar below "hiring straight out of college in droves".

Hiring more self taught and bootcamp people is often advocated as a way to increase diversity, and a lot of roles don't require a college degree (plus a lot of self taught and bootcamp folks are very good). However, on a large enough dataset, they will be weaker candidates. So if you use those sources to improve diversity, you'll end up with a correlation between diverse hires and more junior devs. Which screws up with every other metrics you'll look at.

I'm not sure you're going to correct the perceived gender/racial/whatever imbalances if you start hiring self-taught programmers and bootcamp grads in droves, just looking at the typical demographics of the people that self-select into those cohorts.

there's actually quite a few bootcamps and social programs to help minorities break into the field, actually.

If the bar is the same, but there are fewer female applicants than male applicants, then there will necessarily be fewer females accepted (assuming standards are applied equally).

Until the number of women in our field are on par with men, efforts to create an artificial balance will mean lowering the bar.

I like your non-bigoted explanation, I wouldn't have expressed it in such a way.

its even more troubling then that. When faced with stiffer ability to get interviews (let alone offers), we practice a ton more to increase our hard skills. more practice does tend to lead to being more proficient at something. my female friends generally got 5-10 interviews a week. me, not so much

I was going to elaborate in my original post, but I like my upvotes.

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