Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

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> What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women?

One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions. There are many great engineers I've worked with who didn't do a CS degree, and even though they are brilliant thinkers and talented engineers, too many times the interview question is "solve this problem using <pet CS 101 lesson, like red-black trees>".

And the number of people who are hired who can barely communicate effectively is still shocking. Very few interview questions focus on communication outside the technical realm.

So you can argue there is a bias in recruiting, simply because different people have different criteria for what the best traits/skills to look for is - even though everybody has the same goal, hiring the "best".

I'd also caution about taking Reuters too seriously though. Seems that they've only focused on the gender issue, but this is the money quote:

> With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.

> One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions

No. If you go down that path, then you are implying that women do in fact perform worse at CS-related questions. That's a much bigger can of worms than the bias being implicated here.

Hopefully we can at least agree that those questions are limited in effectiveness, and often have no actual relation to how good an engineer is. It varies of course.

Sometimes, they seem more like a secret handshake you need to memorize to get into the boys club than actually useful engineering. Who hasn't had to revise some of these before applying for a job 3 years out of college?

What it does do is effectively exclude applicants who didn't study CS, or who haven't heard of and memorized "cracking the coding interview".

Assuming `fake CS questions == good engineer` is a huge mistake, but one i keep getting downvoted for everytime i mention it. Most rebuttals are usually something like "it's the best system we have", something i find unsatisfying.

There is an interesting tangent in this thread where we can wonder what it would reveal if "coding interview" type CS tests were administered along with standard IQ tests (or the application included SAT scores). Do coding tests predict work performance better or worse than an IQ test? If worse, are they merely "culture fit" bias filters meant to retain the ingroup? If better, is it because culture fit actually matters, or because there is in fact some CS-specific skill or set of assumed knowledge that matters in programming that goes beyond logic?

While I understand that using IQ tests as hiring predictors is itself a problem, I'm interested in the interplay in predictive ability between the two classes of tests. I think everyone would agree that any primarily intellectual timed test that was _less_ salient to work performance than an IQ test should be binned. What would happen to our interviews then?

Using an IQ test in order to hire is actually illegal. If only the laws were that simple..

It may imply this on a long enough timescale, but as it stands it only implies more that there is a historically larger pool of capable female employees sans CS degrees than there are candidates with. Which is demonstrably true.

I don't understand how your example is an evidence that data came from mean who didn't want to hire women.

These interview processes exist sure, and I personally find them idiotic, but is there evidence that they disqualify women more than men?

From this article/Amazon - no. From my personal experience, yes.

After we moved to a logic-based test, we were able to hire several more women from interesting disciplines including psychology, math, and biology. The tests involved technical problems written in a general way. For example, thread scheduling was written to instead involving painters, rooms, and drying time. We were able to hire 4 women on a ~50 person team in a very short time, and it worked out pretty well.

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