How do you try to screen the environment and figure out if it is a hellscape before you enter?
I'd welcome any feedback. I am working on a research project on how people analyze and screen when offered a new position...
1. Negative if has a "diversity" panel or ombudsman (will explain more below).
2. If all VPs and "big shots" came from the same university
3. Power Ranger Factor (negative factor)
If #1 is present and there are several examples the Company is more cautious about the virtue signalling and to avoid fire the bad "minority" will allocate them on a "non work" club. Mostly "push paper" tasks or trivial tasks that will not have direct impact on revenues. No good position to be it as I want to make an impact.
#3 If in all communications there should be All "races" all the time like Power Rangers again feels fake.
I never set my hiring forms as minority and try to best to blend in. I just hate when people get too touchy about something from my culture or country and don't want to touch the subject. So I have to came forward and say: "Heyyyy I escaped from there I know how it works and how to deal with that... So please lets be frank XX will not work maybe we should do Y" and that is it.
There are bad actors in All races. There are bad actors in Asian companies, in Indian companies in European companies. The question is how much they hide or fire them.
Great companies don't look your name, age or school. They look at your CV, portfolio and ask questions about your work and your skills. They test you and bang you are hired. They don't care about my political affiliations or if I got to the church.
Is Glassdoor helpful at all or just in a general way?
Do you try to get a reference or insight from someone at the company who is a minority or anything like that to vet it?
You can only grasp what happened with a person in a certain moment and mood.
One of the companies I worked for in Glassdoor was the hell on earth for me was the best job.
So it is a case of "bad ex" .
No ties with terrorist organisations or embargoed countries.
That should clear the real bad ones.
And what is the standard? If a potential employee is affiliated with the Socialist Worker's Party or the Right to Life Party, are they disqualified? How about Democratic party?
Unless the job is a germance policy making position or includes tasks that anathema and where good conscience would impair their ability to perform work, it's none of your business.
If anything I ask the engineering team about recent emergencies and crunch - but never `hOw rEpReSeNteD arE mInOritIeS`? That's gross.
I've made friends with some of the women I worked with back when I was a government contractor and they had their fair share of horror stories both working for contractors and working directly for the government. Sexual harassment, groping, you name it.
How much is "fair amount"? Of all the companies that exist. And where are you getting this data from?
As best as I can tell, however, the general consensus among women seems to be: A lot more than most men think.
If they don't admit it then they aren't "openly shitty to women".
On a less snarky note, I’m aware of the gender balance of my interviewers. At a startup with an engineering team of 3, not having any other women is expected and can be excused; but presumably there’s at least one other woman in the company available for a culture fit interview, right? ... right?
Good signs: existence of an actual HR department (the CFO and an entry level recruiter don’t count); women holding key leadership positions; an office full of faces that reflect the gender and ethnic and age diversity of the city I live in.
Red flags: a strong alcohol culture or one that involves very long hours or lots of mandatory fun time; nobody over 30 in the office, or founders who started the company less than 5 years out of college; an imbalance of women in support roles; water cooler and lunch conversations self-sorting by gender or ethnicity.
Also, many women who have been in the workforce have developed or discovered whisper networks where we can find out about what it’s like to work at various companies.
The networks also often share salary information.
That's most likely not going to happen. Tech is a demanding industry and, with age, lots of people start looking for easier/less demanding jobs, even if they pay less. That's why you may see some 60+ year old COBOL maintainers, who stepped off the tech treadmill decades ago and are just now cruising towards retirement, but you, for the most part, won't see 60 years React developers - people at this age value their sanity and don't want to run on the treadmill any more.
At a shitty company. Just went to a 60th birthday party for one of the tech leads who just finished a major rollout that impacted about 50,000 people and is standing up our SRE program.
In my native language we have different terms for:
- (Very) young woman as in child - up to around college age
- Woman up to her, let's say thirties or mid-thirties (it's a matter of personal reference, I guess). English stil has only "girl".
- After that we generally use "woman" as in more mature female.
Hard to mess up, the context is rather clear.
- Then comes miss/misses which can basically overlap with some of the previous, but you kinda eyeball it
- Lady is more of a descriptive term for someone's style and classy behaviour, and can refer to any age, even to a little girl. If you want to be official, than we would probably use Ms/Mrs, rarely lady. Sometimes lady can be pejorative. It's complicated to call (invoke) somebody as "lady" (hey lady). "Ladies and gentlemen" is a rare direct usage.
So... When using English without switching context properly, I find myself confused what to use because I miss some tools I'm used to in my language. I actually find "lady" to be handy in that manner, because it kinda replaces multiple terms I'm used to :-).
boy/girl guy/gal gentleman/lady man/woman male/female
When people mix pairs, it is most often to single out the woman. One of the most egregious is guy/girl. The use of "lady" is old-fashioned, and raises a red flag about what other "old-fashioned" ideas the speaker might hold.
Keep your paws off my shared language. I want to be able to refer to people without googling for the polite terminology du jour, since even "woman" is offensive in some circles.
Edit: to further clarify, when I use "lady" it quite literally means the same as "guy" with the caveat that the gender is taken into account. "You ladies going out for lunch?" is the same as "You guys going out for lunch?" with the difference being there would be no males in the first group. "I interviewed a lady" is the same in my head as "I interviewed a guy."
Most words have 'a connotation', it's not a reason not to use them. Offense at 'lady' and preference for 'woman' is baffling.
Like most similar baffling things on HN, I'll assume this is an American (or even region within) thing.
I suspect you're more or less alone in your opinion.
In my native language, there is a semi-formal term we use which is neither rigid nor offensive... "tuan" for men (Sir) and "cik puan" for women (Miss Mrs). For English, I think the closest to this is "lady", and this might be why many non-native English speakers use "sir".
Update: Found it, it was Rachel Nabors here, https://twitter.com/rachelnabors/status/1114310745590726656
But I cannot understand how it would work in practice:
- Your former employer is giving out your contact information so you can help them recruit(?)
- Your former employer is asking you to essentially work for free
- But if your former employer offers you compensation now your opinion is biased
- You may have liability issues (e.g. you say something unfavorable OR favorable, and you can be sued by the perspective employee or former employer)
Rachel Nabors on twitter said it worked in the past, and I won't discount her experiences. I am genuinely curious to understand how the former employer arranged that with a former employee though.
I think a lot of women would view a request like this as helping other women, rather than helping the company. Plus, as Nabors points out, the company would presumably ask the ex-employee permission before giving out contact info.
I think it may not be a good idea to draw conclusions from this without seeing if they do the same for guys too (which you may not be able to observe during an interview). In my workplace everyone pretty much holds the door for everyone else if they're walking in a group. The first person who gets to the door will open it and stand behind it while the others walk in first. Sometimes we'll throw in a lighthearted "after you" too. I'd really hate for someone visiting our company to get the wrong idea about our culture from a common courtesy, especially in an interview scenario where the interviewer may just be trying to be nice to the interviewee regardless of their gender.
How do you filter the people who hold the door for everyone vs the ones that are only doing it for ladies? Or for those fellas who where told countless times as a youth to hold the door for a woman. Because someone is polite, that is a red flag?
As for calling a woman a lady this one is new to me, and I don't think I've ever used the word "colleague" aloud in my life. I would say, "that is a {guy|lady} that I work with." I've never been made aware previously that referring to a woman as a lady would be taken negatively. I had only heard that some woman don't care for ma'am as they can feel that is a title for an older woman. fwiw, I do tend to use gender neutral words like "they" or "them" over he/she when writing.
"Person" also works in this case. +1 for they. "Lady" seems patronizing to me - would you call someone a "gentleman"? To me, "lady" describes a woman who is "traditionally feminine" – I get that when people use "lady" today they don't typically mean "traditionally feminine," but "lady" is still evocative of a time when women were seen as delicate/demure/less than men.
The same thing happens often in trains, where sometimes as a man you get snarky comments or disapproving looks from other passengers for not jumping up to "rescue" a woman that dares to put her luggage in the overhead compartment all by herself. Would be curious to hear how women here see this but I always think that people are able to ask for help if they really need it and that automatically assuming that they can't put their luggage up by themselves is degrading to them.
Sorting people by gender and age when going through doors or out of an elevator is also silly and degrading I think, so I can understand that you don't want to work in such an environment.