We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

I'm not sure if you realize this, but change always seems impossible until it happens. 10 years ago it seemed completely impossible that Facebook would have 1B users, let alone the ~3B it has now.

The same 10 years ago it seemed impossible to that gay people would be able to marry, and even 4 years ago the idea of a Trump presidency was considered a joke.

Change is and will remain hard. That doesn't mean it isn't desirable nor does it mean that people shouldn't bang their heads against walls to make it happen.

Oh it can be done, it just requires reducing the number of male employees in one way or another. Everyone wants to believe the utopian ideal of perfectly-balanced ratios of employees can be achieved without someone getting the short end of the stick, but reality says otherwise.

Companies used to train internally - watch an older TV show (or even something like Better Call Saul) and see how many characters "worked their way up from the mail room". The death of company loyalty goes both ways but I'm sure it can be mended with some effort. Where I work one of the better programmers I knew was an immigrant from south east Asia who started in the warehouse and had an interest in programming. I don't know whether or not he had a degree, but the point was he worked hard to prove himself, and they took a chance to give him a go.

So I guess my point is, graduate statistics isn't the end of the story.

Having no CS degree myself and excelling in a top 10 company I agree with this sentiment, especially seeing the epidemic of “over leveling” the small pool of CS graduates occurring. I’d rather work with correctly leveled non-CS graduates than over-leveled CS graduates

Also, just because you have a goal to aspire to doesn't mean you can realistically meet it. Suppose if every high achiever in a school wants to be valedictorian, but only one of them will make it. That in itself doesn't mean it's a pointless goal.

https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html

Definitely worth a look, even if you don't think it applies here.

I doubt it is. You’re writing off all the self-taught coders. You’re also writing off all the non-coders.

Most companies seem to think they want a 10:1:1 ratio of engineers:designers:product managers, etc.

I think 3:3:3 would be better, and makes your issue go away.

But we have this worship of “engineering” as some sort of magical thing that happens in a vacuum and requires no cross-discipline input.

Meanwhile every tech company I’ve ever worked for is pathologically rewriting the same code over and over, bashing their heads against the same tech debt over and over, and regularly wasting millions of dollars Building The Wrong Thing.

Heck we should probably have 10:1 masseuses and 10:1 psychotherapists on staff. Productivity would strictly increase.

Because 1) there is a feedback loop that does show that having role models at the end of the pipeline does help the entire pipeline. 2) It is easier than restructuring the entire pipeline than admitting that it is a societal problem rather than big bad Google being sexist (I'm not saying Google isn't sexist).

This is kind of a pattern in problems that don't have smoking guns. We like to pretend that things are first order problems (problem causes an effect, directly) when most problems are pretty high order and complex. First order problems are usually easier to solve because they have a clear smoking gun. You take care of the bad person that fired the gun and the problem is solved. I actually suspect that this is an evolutionary problem, being that most of our early problems could be approximated by first or second order and thus increase our survival rate. I'm also pretty convinced that we've solved most of those now, and thus that line of thinking doesn't work for modern problems.

But for part 1), if you have the flu, tissues help. They don't cure the flu, but they help you from preventing the spread and alleviate the symptoms. So if you take my preposition about first order problems, I don't think it is hard to see why people would get stuck at that stage. Essentially "we did something and it had a positive effect. So let's keep doing that thing!" That's not bad logic. You admit that they do have __a little__ control over the constraints, so it isn't surprising that they have __a little__ impact. The failure is not continuing to look for more potential solutions and stagnating. Just need to do some PCA, find the other factors, and push on those (as well as what we've already found to have positive effects). But this is much easier said than done, and I think that is part of the problem. Difficult problems are tautologically difficult, but we as a society like to pretend there are simple solutions (come on, admit it, you do this too).

So why do we do this? Well, how many people do you know break down complex problems into multiple components? I know very few, and even then they don't consistently do it.

> If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.

I'd argue that they would just start cheating. Which I think that there is evidence that this is happening (some being given in this article).

Ironically, in my experience, the companies who figured this out a decade ago are the major finance companies. Hire anyone with a pulse, put in the effort to train them, be the only company on the block that isn't active treating these populations like shit, the you get retention rates that are unheard of in tech (especially for such comparativly shitty jobs by metric of pay and interesting things to do). Talent is there, tech companies just choose to ignore it and play into the existing biases ( and out right misogynistic streaks) that already exist.

Maybe 50% is a perfect ideal, but, don't let perfect be the enemy of better. We absolutely should be loudly shaming those at the top that "just can't find talent".

#rantsFromAnAngryTransWoman

Perhaps employers can expand the search to those with degrees in statistics, mathematics, physics, econometrics?

What I've seen time and time again is that when people dont want to hire, they come up with excuse after excuse. When they really want to hire [a VP's brother-in-low, or whatever], even the flimsiest of cases suddenly get made for the hire.

I'd say, we should look think bigger.

Not to mention, if the other companies also wish to hit their diversity goals, they will be forced to take on weaker hires, since the (already small) pool of adequate hires has been exhausted. In my opinion, diversity hiring is an anti-pattern. Hiring should instead ignore demographics information rather than use it to try and achieve some optimal representational balance. If demographics information are completely ignored in the hiring process (which is impossible if you do on-site hiring), then no one can accuse you of favoring a particular group of people.

I don't see why one would assume that gender distribution of CS degree holders is a strong proxy for the gender distribution of available candidates suitable for software development positions. Its true that many big firms (and even a large number of small firms) have a well-known strong bias for CS degree holders (and for CS degree holders from particular elite institutions), but the statistics of the field as a whole, and of CS degree holders, show that that is a bias inconsistent with the real qualifications for the field which cannot avoid exaggerating the gender gap in the field.

> A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them.

That only makes sense if you assume that none of the meeting the target was done by bringing people into the field that otherwise would not be in it, despite the fact that that is typically a focus of such efforts by large firms.

I really thought it was the accepted fact and a starting point of all the discussions on this subject, that the issue is the pool of candidate.

Myself I recently tried to hire a developer and that’s a reality that there is nearly no female candidates. And I‘m not restricting it to CS degree.

I don’t understand how it’s not obvious that what can be done at the hiring process is completely marginal. There is no politics here.

The politics is how much we try to aim for 50% candidates (education, training...)

> Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints?

The post suggests searching and hiring outside of the traditional pipeline, which is something that is within control. The comment is then topped off with a strawman argument:

> If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.

50% is clearly a goal that is a long way away but it doesn't mean we cannot work towards it. Yes, it's probably unrealistic to expect anyone to bring 50% representation to a significant sized workforce within an average tenure. It doesn't mean that the pursuit of gender parity is delusional or that meaningful and achievable targets cannot be set.

If anything this top comment is a prime example of the prevailing biased and unwilling attutide to improve representation in the industry, that has been placed on a pedestal.

It's not surprising if the strategies such as diversity quotas are not effective. Because they're not meant to be effective. They're meant to virtue signal. Ergo they are meant to only redirect people's anger towards an ineffective end, not to create an actual improvement.

For another example, take a prevailing narrative in fake feminism that continually tells women they are disempowered victims. This doesn't help bring balance, it only helps disenfranchise women.

Of course, if that were true, why would anyone believe any of these narratives such as diversity quotas? Because they provide the fake victim fake payoff: there's something very compelling about not having to be responsible for your problem but instead being able to blame someone else albeit incorrectly. It's very satisfying and an effective means to redirect anger towards a ineffective but satisfying ends. It's very compelling for people and gets them hooked.

Another place these fake payoffs are used to manipulate people is in terrorist recruitment. You can sublimate raw economic issues and individuals dissatisfaction into blaming and hatred towards another state, you can create armies of willing footsoldiers.

I'd suggest there's a further parallel between armies and the "Twitter armies": legions of ideologues willing to crucify anyone who dares disagrees.

So it's not surprising these so-called strategies do little effective. they're not meant to, they're meant to preserve the status quo. And they do that by the simple psychological mechanism of redirecting people's anger towards something ineffective.

Some people presume that billionaire multinationals could spend some of their cash fixing the pipeline problem by convincing a few thousand women to take up coding.

More precisely: while technical proclivity and skill are obviously not uniformly distributed across the population, some people believe they "should" be more uniformly distributed than they currently are (because those things can correlate with wealth/power), and that whoever has the power to fix a gender imbalance in wealth/power-probability has the responsibility to do so.

Aside: Interesting how people push for these demographics at software companies but not at elementary/middle/high schools. Maybe if we solve that problem (which is literally just a matter of salaries) then there would be more openings in the tech industry for women and other under-represented groups.

I think the idea behind diversity targets is an implicit assumption that they do. In subtle ways like how/where they advertise, and in more obvious ways like funding educational programs etc. It's there that diversity programs/targets need to start, not at the hiring stage.

Its entire premise is "there aren't enough women with CS degrees, there is a pipeline problem, here are some things to get around it".

The blanket catch-all term "Asian" is not doing this conversation any favors. You assert a monoculture, but Asia is a huge region with many cultures, not a monolith. South Korea is unlike India is unlike the Philippines is unlike Vietnam is unlike Iran is unlike China.

Can you narrow this down so we understand what kind of monoculture you're actually talking about?

At least in the US actually admitting to having gender biased hiring would have to violate a half dozen anti-discrimination labor protection laws, no? Universities are doing affirmative action because there is no legislation mandating they not be sexist in their enrollment whereas corporations don't have that freedom in hiring.

Of course those people are going to succeed more than the average Americans who did not have to go through those filters, somehow being subject to harder selection became an unfair advantage?

You know the easiest way to bring down the average achievement of Asians? Invite a bunch of poor, uneducated, unmotivated Asians to become US citizens, soon those new arrivals will drag down the averages, making Asians into whichever socio-economic group you want.

I think part of this is just the free market at work. Some companies will pass on great talent to meet diversity goals and those that are focused on hiring the best people will end up giving themselves a better chance at succeeding

EDIT:

And another point: moving through the pipeline takes time. So e.g. if you're working on university recruiting and trying to fix the input bias at the high school->university interface, you can't expect to see improvement at the output (university->job) earlier than in 3 to 5 years. But the "it's not a pipeline problem" activists rarely have that kind of patience.

EDIT2:

"you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment", unless you're willing to start doing corrective discrimination - i.e. throwing overrepresented people out from the pipeline.

Another 'easy out' is to simply lower the bar for female applicants

The problem isn’t FAANGs, it’s the rest of the smaller companies that have gone from 20% female to 0% because they can’t compete with google’s salary package and supply really is limited at that stage in the pipe. If you work at a non-FAANG, the problem has gotten much worse than it was 10 years ago.

Essentially they have realized that many recruiting and hiring functions are underperforming, in that they are rejecting, or allowing others to reject, talented candidates who they should have hired.

And what they are realizing is that it is much harder than it seems to avoid this kind of error. Which means that even though they can see the opportunity you mention, they're finding that their companies can't seem to seize it.

Generally speaking, everyone involved in hiring is doing their jobs in good faith; there are very few mustache-twirling villains to be found and defeated. But every single person has preferences and biases which, even if essentially harmless on a personal level, can still create significant effects in the aggregate.

So leaders are trying to boot-strap more diverse cultures by managing to the outcome. It's far easier to reward a hiring function for increasing certain metrics of diversity, than tell them something like "be less racist and sexist when hiring." I mean, the vast majority of people would rightly take offense at that kind of guidance from their boss.

The hope is that in the long run, increasing staff diversity produces a broader mix of preferences and biases, which in aggregate reduces the skew against certain talented candidates. As you say: a compounding effect.

Avoiding bias in hiring can never be as hamfisted as "hire equal numbers of X always" without causing a ton of harm in the process. Especially when you start trying to always hire an equal number of men and women, every ethnicity, every religion, every spoken language, every sexual orientation, every country of origin, etc. There has to be a balance between being inhospitable to diversity and using discrimination to force arbitrary amounts of diversity.

We have a woman who was hired on my team at work. As soon as management saw an actual woman had applied, the interview process was just a formality. She has been with us for several months now and has performed abysmally. If she were a white guy she would not have made it in the front door. Working with her is a constant frustration - explaining basic programming concepts and constantly reminding her what the current task is when she gets distracted looking at cat pictures.

The issue is that the male members of the team resent her and our bosses because she's unfireable as a woman. We want in good faith to support women and other demographics that might be interested in our field! We'd love to do whatever we can to foster interest among any human beings at any stage of the pipeline! But what we're coming to realize is that because management needs to meet some "quota", we'll be providing a subsistence for a net-negative-productivity member of the team for the foreseeable future. Nobody can say a word about it to our manager or director for fear of being labeled a sexist. It's making us resent the whole push for diversity as a whole.

EDIT: Also, why do we think it can be fixed? Can the gender balances in hobbies be fixed? Is the lack of female metalworker hobbyists or male quilters attributable to a “pipeline problem”?

Students with computer science experience get a more advanced course that is explicitly designed not to make them more competitive in second-year courses (instead, it starts on material that will re-appear in third-year courses). Students with no computer science experience get their own intro course. And there is yet another "green" intro course tailored to biological applications.

The article suggests that these practices help level the playing field in the first two years of the computer science major, by which point people have enough invested to finish.

On reflection, these aren't new suggestions. Unlocking the Clubhouse, a 2002 book on women's experiences studying computer science, made similar recommendations. But I guess most colleges are struggling to handle the glut of first-year computer science students, let alone teach more courses to encourage more of them.

However, I think it should still be mentioned as one of the key reasons why they have parity, rather than claiming it's simply due to changing the culture and courses, especially if we're asking other institutions to learn from them.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/1...

For a back-of-envelope calculation[1][2], it looks like there were 27 CS majors out of Harvey Mudd in 2017. We can probably add in another 20 from the joint CS-Math degree. So, about 50. Berkeley, on the other hand, graduates almost a thousand students in EE or CS every year. Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, UCSD... these schools all graduate large numbers of CS majors and compete with each other for the top students.

The accounting is tough here because the degrees at Harvey Mudd and Berkeley are different, so I may be over or under counting, but we're talking about a massive difference in scale here.

Let's take one metric - the AP Computer science test. About 27% or the people who took the AP Computer science test are women. Harvey Mudd is small enough that it could probably fill 100% of the starting class with women who got 5's on the AP Computer science test and have near perfect math grades and SAT scores. But if scores are roughly evenly distributed between men and women, eventually, you're going to have a school that has more men with 5's than women - and the only way to reach 50-50 parity will be to select women who got 4s or 3s with men who got 5s. It won't be Harvey Mudd, but that's because HM is tiny and elite. Instead, it'll be Berkeley, or Georgia Tech, or UC San Diego, or U Texas. Would Harvey Mudd be able to maintain this at 1000 CS majors, using the same methods they do now, while competing fiercely for the top students in this environment and at this scale?

[1] https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-sta... [2] https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers

I just wanted to point out that this is objectively wrong for our profession and misleading at best. Women were a large part of early software development and computer science, composing far more than 20% of majors [1] and that this article is specifically related to computer science and software engineering.

Clearly something happened in the 80s that caused a transformation and I think attempting to explain it with a biological basis is simply factually wrong. It seems like whenever an explanation attempts to use gender differences as some sort of rationale it comes coupled with ignoring the very objective history of computer science.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

Anyway I assume you mean that there's a bunch of these types of skills that might be unevenly distributed, and indeed it would make sense to have the numbers.

I'd say one thing to think about is whether there's an economic effect taking place. Suppose women have comparative advantage in something that isn't software. Then even though they might be just as good at it, fewer of them would choose it. And this is where actually absolutes are not what matter, it's the relative opportunity costs that do. So looking at who is better at spatial reasoning might seem sensible, but the decision might be better understood as economic, requiring us to look at Ricardo.

Another issue is in what's being measured. Even if you do observe a gender difference, how can you be sure it's an inherent difference caused by biology, and not an emergent difference caused by environmental or experiential factors?

Regardless, if you replace "women" with "people of color", then it's even more obvious that we're not in the equilibrium state. No matter how you dice it, suggesting that a man who is non-white is somehow less suited to software development work isn't defensible in any way.

About 7 years ago, I started to wonder about a cluster of concepts that I've yet to successfully explain to anyone without getting a confused look...

Roughly, it's a curiosity about what (if anything) is in the joints and gaps and shadows around the more salient features of our existence. An example is like: how (if at all) does having systems for getting rid of unpleasant things (human waste, trash, unwanted products, corpses, people who are disabled/invalid/elderly, criminals...) shape our thinking and understanding?

Privately, I think about this as unraveling: pulling on loose threads anywhere I catch myself or others taking something for granted.

A consequence of picking around in these gaps and cracks is that I've grown frustrated with most of the discourse, research, and subsequent popular-press reporting that has any overlap with a human/social system. The problem is pretty ubiquitous. The kindest diagnosis I can give is that there may be a big hole in our language(s)/grammar.

So, the methodology of the 2003 study (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03196134.p...) cited first in the paragraph you link at Wikipedia documents its sample: "The participants were 60 men and 60 women who were each paid the equivalent of $4.50 U.S. Between 20 and 30 years of age (mean age, 22.2 years), all were right-handed students enrolled in either undergraduate or graduate programs (in social science, French, or administration) at the Université de Montréal."

Likewise, here's the first sentence of the discussion: "The present results revealed relatively high accuracy levels overall. Although men did not supply significantly more correct answers than did women across the three conditions, they needed, on average, less time to carry out the mental rotation of the structures illustrated in Vandenberg and Kuse’s (1978) items."

I want to draw a few threads out of this:

1. A more honest summary of the research is something like: "60 male and 60 female college students at a single university in Montreal, between the ages of 20 and 30, when studied in the early 2000s, representing 3 majors, selected by an unspecified strategy which involved compensation of $4.50 and then broken into 3 subgroups of 20 and given a similar mental rotation task in a different format, performed the mental rotations with similarly high levels of accuracy, though the selected male students groups did so around 33% faster." This is an improvement, but it still doesn't well-reflect how low our confidence still is that it measured anything accurate (let alone valid) about statistically indistinguishable groups ~now, let alone our roughly total inability to answer whether this relationship is fixed and durable across meaningful timescales.

2. There are reasonable alternatives to the headline treatment of the result. Since there was no statistically significant difference in the accuracy of their results--only the response time--the narrative about men's superior performance this task merits scrutiny. Is the difference explained by differences in confidence? Cautiousness? Familiarity with similar tasks? The study makes a halfhearted attempt to address cautiousness by asking for a self-report on whether they double-checked their answers, and on how difficult they thought the task was. Women consistently rated the problems as more difficult (but answered as accurately). Why did they rate it as more difficult?

3. The study discusses two main reported rotation strategies in the literature--holistic and analytic--and that the holistic strategies tend to be faster than the analytic strategies. It also notes that "The literature thus suggests that, in the standard visual presentation condition, the holistic strategies preferred by men are more efficient than the analytic strategies preferred by women." I haven't read the whole study, but I don't see any attempt to tease out to what extent response time differences persist or disappear when controlling for strategy. I see no discussion of or attempt to investigate why men and women are using different strategies. But, the fact that the primary difference is response time, and a response-time difference is noted between strategies, and strategy differences are noted between the genders, and how cultural/experiential and non-intrinsic strategy selection appears as a variable, I'm a bit slack-jawed that this isn't the headline result.

4. I see no examination or breakdown of demographics/activities that might matter. Keep in mind that while they covered 120 students in total, each individual test group is 20 students with no discussion of how they were selected. These groups are small enough to be vulnerable to weird samples even if they did draw statistically random samples. How many of these students played sports? Which one? How recently? At what level? What about adjacent recreational activities they might not consider a sport, such as shooting, skating, skateboarding, bowling, rock-climbing, kayaking, mountain-biking, yoga, running, etc. How many practice some sort of art or craft? Do they play video games? Pilot any sort of vehicle? Does controlling for any of these affect the observed gender difference?

Moving beyond the study itself:

5. If the response-time difference is durable and intrinsic, it's not obvious what if any bearing a response-time difference the measured task has on how well men and women can perform an engineering job. They might not even be meaningfully correlated. Is an engineer's performance strongly bottlenecked by how quickly they rotate objects, or is this delta largely leveled in practice by other factors (e.g., my typing speed is rarely the thing that limits how much code I write in a day).

6. Even if such a speed difference does have a bearing on how well men and women perform an engineering job, there's no basis for assuming the magnitude of the speed performance difference would equal the magnitude of the job performance difference (which could be larger, smaller).

https://womenintheworld.com/2018/02/27/study-finds-women-in-...

I do/did, and the reason she ended up as a programmer was because she wasn't considered for an engineering program (because they already had a woman studying engineering) and had to take a math scholarship instead.

If we want to continue to live in a world where women can become engineers, and managers, and CEOs, then some of the talented people who were forced to become programmers in earlier days are going to be diverted.

Guess who doesn't have career trajectories. (Spoiler: It's young people.)

This is a really broad stroke and it may even be true to a high degree. But I've had (and given) plenty of interviews where we engage a topic and just talk about it openly as if we were already colleagues. Maybe that's a Swedish thing?

Interviewers don't need to be adversarial to determine if a candidate is going to be good for the role. Interviewees shouldn't be passive, and should be using the time to determine if the company is even a good fit for them.

Seriously: go back to the 50's and 60's and you'll find all these same arguments about how women can't be good doctors and law is a man's world. And they were all wrong.

Why is computer science special in a way that medicine isn't? Why can women heal but not code? Isn't that the harder point to prove than "it's a pipeline problem"?

Why don't you see yourself as a person who likes CS/tech and likes doing XYZ things with ABC tools? Or maybe believe for a brief second that the "caucasian American", is probably thinking about what show to watch on Netflix rather than some shitty thoughts about how you don't fit in.

I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. I'm willing to bet there are way too many Asians (yellow and brown) for that to be true.

Also, seriously wtf is LatinX? Seriously.

<--- this author is also an immigrant from that small country north of Peru.

English already has a gender neutral adjective to refer to us, Latin, and therefore Latin American.

LatinX means you've internalized the colonialization of white "liberals" [0] who would refer to us as Latinos or Latinas while speaking English to show off their poor Spanish and therefore pretend to be sophisticated and woke.

[0] I don't consider liberal bad or good, just that the people who use latino/a/X seem to self-identify as liberals.

My mother family is mixed of black and native american.

Almost every single time I faced discrimination, was because I was "white", for example open hostility by 100% black people assuming that I was "white" and evil or something, or when I was informed I should not apply for affirmative action because I was too white looking, or many, many times I was called racist as soon people saw a picture of me during some argument or another.

To me it is obvious that further segregation and racism, is not the answer to segregation and racism.

You've described me perfectly. Except that I'm an anxious, pale-skinned, Jewish guy from rural Oregon who was bullied throughout high school for being, I dunno, skinny, pale, and awkward. This has resulted in a lot of self-worth issues, social anxiety, and major depression, which I struggle with to this day, nearly 15 years after high school. I have been interviewing for high-level companies for the past year and...have not secured a single offer, probably because I suck at interviewing, but who the hell knows?

Anyway, I get what you're saying about the "Zuck" personality type, and that's refreshing for you to mention. I, too, am pretty intimidated by some of the people you describe. I am sorry that they make you feel that way. They probably don't intend to. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that there are a LOT of "non-POC" people, AKA Zuckerberg-looking folks, who are incredibly anxious and just want you to smile at them and try to get to know them as a _human being_. I don't want to be grouped together with all the people in this country that have light skin. It's not fair to me.

I suspect that some of the "non-POC" people (why don't you just say white people?) COULD wrongfully see you as an intended "diversity hire", and need to "prove your worth" accordingly, which is racist and wrong. But the problem is that the narrative you're putting forth is encouraging companies to take measures to make the workplace more diverse. If you follow this idea down the rabbit hole, I think it will hurt people that look like me, who have no acceptable "race card" to play. And that's OK. But down the road, it's going to lead to more racial friction. I don't want to be put into a racial box based on my phenotypes. What if there was a form of affirmative action that led to more anxious and depressed people getting better jobs? For a few minutes it sounds awesome, but it's probably the wrong way to go about things, because I think it would lead to animosity between neurotypical people and, to use a woke term, the "neurodiverse".

Why should there be predetermined amount of women or "minorities" in these programs? Who says that's how it should be?

Is this true for all jobs in the world, or just in "these" programs? If so, who chose these particular programs to be "special"?

If not, where is the "fight" for all the other jobs like plumbing, oil drilling, special forces in combat, working on top of 35+ story buildings? Why is nobody counting in those fields?

Those are the things I like to think about whenever I hear something that makes no sense.

Ok, see, this assertion bugs me. The linked post SPECIFICALLY talks about biasing hiring and recruiting in favor of women. Diversity efforts, by definition, are hiring and recruiting bias, but for supposedly benevolent reasons. But you’re dismissing that and implying that there are subtle, hidden, unremovable biases that only certain people are capable of even seeing. If somebody were to suggest that you’re imagining things, there’s no way to test your theory against theirs, since you’re begging the question (in the original philosophical sense).

I get it. Interviewers still think they should evaluate how a candidate will "fit into our culture" without any examination of what that means. For a lot of teams that still translates to "same shows, same games, same fondness for happy hours, same comfort for vaguely inappropriate jokes". If a candidate doesn't seem to fit into that sort of "culture", it's easy to pass them over for the next one.

What can I do to do better?

Anything specific that white interviewers could do differently to make you feel more at ease?

> It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that.

Well yeah, it's Google, so that's possible. Or maybe the company is large enough now that those kinds of high level individuals are diluted in their engineering pool? But it certainly had that reputation early on, that any random person interviewing you could be top in their field of expertise.

> The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.

Hah, yeah, that's very much part of the culture. Having the best argument or data or working code matters. Not how politely you talk about it.

Which can certainly have its advantages, as long as everyone can let go of personally identifying with their idea once they are convinced of a better one. Then it can be a real positive.

It's interesting that you went on to describe your bias against white interviewers. It's going to be quite difficult for white people to hire non-white people into their organization if non-white people are biased against performing well for white interviewers.

Because humans are biased.

Basically, someone similar to you will naturally seem like a better and more skilled person

There is reason to believe that women, people of color, etc are unfairly kept out and it does great harm to their lives (and has other undesirable consequences). We mostly don't know how to remedy that, so we come up with some cludgy thing like "Let's set a goal of hiring more women" instead of looking for a more elegant solution.

Unsurprisingly, it tends to not work all that well. Then you get articles like this one trying to explain the failure, in essence.

Edit: The Rooney Rule is the only elegant solution I've really seen for systemic bias in hiring. The NFL requires teams to interview people of color who apply for certain positions because they determined that the bias in their pipeline was pre-interview stage. It did wonders to improve the numbers without setting a quota.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule

The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things.

It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that I am not sure which universe your comment applies to.

And yes, what you said matters, as does race, country of origin, and economic background. Intersectionality is a fancy word, but it's useful, and the article mentions it.

So that said, 50% is a useful number. It's useful to say that if the actual hiring rate is at 15%, we still have a problem.

In the small minority of hacker rank study set, I would say that women are just as much encouraged or frankly expected to be in STEM as men. Although I am fairly certain that this observation will quickly disappear and will be heavily male dominated on a larger percentage of the population.

Really, looking at the actual hacker rank source, it seems like their sample set is really tiny and heavily biased.

If you score at the top in your entrance exams, you will applying to medical or engineering schools. The good schools are hyper selective and only take the top scorers (at a rate more selective than our ivy's). Very, very few people consider majors outside of these areas. Secondly, there is a huge amount of social pressure to be an engineer or doctor. It is quite often that parents choose your major, or at least heavily push their kids into one. There are lots of Bollywood movies whose plots are centered around parents forcing their kids into engineering.

Since your choice of major is largely determined by academic and social reasons there isn't a big gender disparity. Females do just as well on the entrance exams, and there is no societal view that engineering is a male major. If you are a parent who wants your kids to earn well and marry well, you will push your kids towards medicine or engineering regardless of gender. If you are female who scored well and got entrance into a top engineering school, dropping out would be unthinkable. It would be an insult to your family. You would be throwing away years of hard work in their view; some kids start preparing for entrance exams when the hit 14. There is even a suicide problem when people fail out of the top schools (see the movie 3 Idiots). Essentially majors and careers have a hierarchy which is the same regardless of gender.

As to why there isn't a societal bias that engineering is a male major, I'm not sure. It was definitely a quick change as it was only in the 1960s when most engineering colleges started admitting females.

There is definitely still a gender gap (many women are not supported to even finish basic schooling), but there isn't a huge societal bias that engineering major or STEM is a male profession.

I have heard that some of the USSR countries (Russia, Ukraine) have a similar culture and don't view engineering or STEM as "male" majors.

Maybe the problem is parents don't bully their daughters and sons into engineering here :)

Secondarily, Indian education admissions have a high co-efficient on standardized tests and a near zero co-efficient on 'well-roundedness'. Affirmative action is caste-based and implemented via quotas filled from the standardized-test scores.

Finally, lots of SWEs in India are drudge-work engineers. They may spend a few days changing the text on a ColdFusion page. For these jobs there is a bare selection mechanism that involves your university GPA-equivalent and whether you can speak English (usually). The large number of graduates will then spend their time 'on the bench' as spare burstable capacity to perform this sort of drudge-work maintenance. The lack of a selection mechanism removes a source of bias.

So some good things, some bad things. Some don't apply to Google India (like the last one, I think).

EDIT: Sorry, had to create a throwaway for this one, but I lived there (and observed this for many of my friends, though not for myself) and felt you deserved to have live info. I'll accept the full ban on my account for bypassing the rate-limit.

> Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to?

The gender equality paradox details many of these sorts of inconsistencies. For instance, why does Iran have gender parity in compsci while virtually all progressive cultures struggle to crack 20% in compsci?

It's only when there's a lot of economic pressure that women that they start going into fields they don't tend to go into. India, specifically, has a lot of pressure for people to go into software dev.

Here's the LA Times talking about it:

https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-women-e...

Are you actually counting how many of you are woman and conclude based on that, that you are better off than other companies?

It's not low, or high, or medium. It just is. As long as you are not rejecting perfectly capable women/females (just because they are so), you are not doing anything wrong and you are not worse off.

Since an Engineer may change jobs half a dozen times over a career, but women generally change once (to non-Engineering job) we have a cumulative effect.

Many women get nudged/pushed into middle management instead of promoted to technical leads or directorships. It's often a way for companies to claim they "promote" women, while forcing them into roles that are vulnerable to layoffs.

The problem look very similar if you want male employees in a female dominate work place or female employees in a male dominated work place. Retention rate is going to be problem, and it is going to be a consistent problem from the first year as a student to 30 years later into the career.

The common result is that people move into local groups where they can be part of a majority. Male teachers going into physical education where most the other physical education teachers are also male. In IT we see female programmers go into design or team leader, where most other designers and team leaders are female.

It is a very hard problem to solve.

In fact, if it was a boy, many people would have chalked it up to "Well of course boys like to move around and be active. Who likes to sit down and count things, anyway?"

And indeed I did, and took to math and CS like a duck to water.

No idea whether that's common, nor whether it might be more common for males, but it's hard to see how someone with that intuitive drive wasn't going to do quite well in the subject.

Soon after the industry seriously stops doing this, the fancy name schools will quickly get female-dominated, and whatever the industry starts using as a signal of candidate quality that hadn't been male-dominated before, will start to be.

When proposing new policies, always solve for equilibrium, don't ignore second order effects, and never assume the world is steady state system.

He was recently told in an interview that he otherwise passed with flying colors that, "someone with a boot camp education couldn't be seriously considered."

It's mind blowing to me that anyone in charge of hiring for technical positions can be dense enough to think that your education stops when your career starts.

1) The fact that people aren't hiring from schools lower on the list tells me that we have an oversupply of CS majors. If I need an employee, I'll do what I have to to get one--this indicates that most companies don't really need CS people.

2) "60% of software engineers at FAAMNG hold a degree from a top 20 school" isn't automatically damning. Some of those schools simply produce a LOT of students. I seem to remember something like University of Illinois produces almost 20% of all engineers graduated annually. Silicon Valley also may simply have a local bias because Berkeley and Stanford are literally next door.

3) If I had a chance to direct a talented female in terms of college study, I would point her at engineering, not CS. Engineering has its own bias problems, but seems to be a lot less toxic than CS. It also seems to have better geographic spread of jobs than CS right now.

https://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/11/08/graphic-gender-rati...

It would seem declared majors aren't following through to the end of their programs.

This is a narrative I see taking hold in the past few years but I'm not convinced that prior to the 1980s women were the majority of software developers. My impression was that this has to do with how a job was defined, and that many data entry type positions were considered to fall beneath the rubric of computer science.

Having no evidence to offer of my own for or against, I wonder if anyone else can link anything germane to the discussion.

More males are diagnosed, doesn't necessarily mean it occurs more.

Not in anyway stating I believe this is true or is what is happening, just offering a counter point for how it could happen with no bias on anyone’s part.

Students from top tier universities go on to jobs where their education is actually useful. (Usually; there are always a number that don't quite make it.) Somebody has to write all the system software, database engines, compilers, and frameworks that the boot camp graduates use to do their jobs.

Completely insane. I can't understand who came up with and spread it around with a straight face.

"hey we better hire predetermined % of <insert any group that is non-white-christian-men> otherwise we are bigots"

Truly remarkable how insane it is.

I haven't seen a single case where the people that ought to be employed are white Christian men.

Why is that so? Does nobody ask this question? Can it be coincidence that nobody, ever, ever raised an issue that not enough white Christian men were employed?

A lot of illogical and improbable things, and IMHO it's just not a coincidence. But I don't have good understanding on why it happens, though.

When we see extremes of representation we should take a step back and question why. In a lot of cases you are dealing with something systemic that may be able to change. For nursing, in the 1950s it was perceived as a female profession but as that viewpoint is going away, more men are joining the field.

Recruiting people that 'fit the job' leads to a mono-culture. Besides being unfair, this is bad for companies. It means you get collective blind-spots, collective hype-trains. Moreover, you reduce the effective hiring pool. Because, if you have a mono-culture then there is significant disruption to adding things outside the mono-culture. This reduction in the hiring pool means there is a lot of talent left on the table.

This means you hit a local maximum that is not a global one. Trying to move to the global maximum means moving away from the local maximum for a while.

> Moreover, you can’t complain about so-called systemic sexism or racism when your policy is to not recruit white, asian or men that could fulfill the job precisely because of their race/sex.

You can however complain about systemic disadvantages conferred to women and people who aren't Caucasian and have a policy to prefer people who are women or not Caucasian. Especially if you think that these people would have a positive effect on your company.

Ironically, most people of color I've met find this all to be quite silly - they are professionals in their career, and want to be treated as such.

Unfortunately, that describes human nature in general.

What if the rate at which women enter, say, CS, relative to other fields is actaully the "correct" rate, and the male population's numbers are inflated for some bad reason?

No, that's not the reason. Senior/youth discount rates also doesn't look at individuals, and yet they're not generally seen as bad. The inherent moral nature of the discrimination itself is extremely important.

As someone who moved from a post-socialist country to USA, I would like you to know there's a lot more to role model nonsense than meets the eye. And to environment in general.

My perspective on life, career, and success is completely than my girlfriend's. I grew up surrounded assuming that the only way to make more than $50k/year is to be a crook. She grew up in Palo Alto, making $X00k/year to her sounds like just a default. Successful people start the next ebay.

It took me years to overcome that. Without anyone discriminating against me at all. It was just me discriminating against myself by [subconsciously] thinking certain things just aren't possible.

Yes even though I had Bill Gates, James Watt, Edison, Tesla, and Oprah Winfrey as role models growing up. That was nice to dream but surely not achievable.

> Role model nonsense is even more absurd, because it already assumes things like women can't have men role models. You need to have the sexist mindset in the first place for this to even be a problem.

I have felt this very acutely and it's offensive to assume I'm sexist just because I don't see people like me at the higher levels of the org, and struggle to figure out how to balance my identity with what the org wants as a result.

Women can have male role models, but it's not the same - there are behavioral expectations of men and women that are just different. A woman can't simply "act like a man" and get the same response, and saying that's a perfectly fine solution is quite ignorant. In any case you shouldn't have to give up your identity when that has nothing to do with what actually gets the work done.

When you enter a new workplace and realize that there is nobody like you there - especially in the higher ranks - you are fighting a very difficult battle. You aren't sure what behaviors get rewarded and which get you attacked. You get left out of the little friend groups and other opportunities for connection, and you feel like an outsider.

It's not about envy at all. It's about feeling seen, about feeling accepted and like you belong in the workplace. It's about getting the group that can do the best job, and that often means a diverse team, not a homogenous one.

"instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes. This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human"

He talked about the issue of stereotyping in science and the harm this caused his field, but it can really be seen as an insight in why people so easy start to do it once the culture makes it acceptable. It is easier. It does save the trouble of thinking. Looking at people as individuals is hard, takes energy and is prone to come back and bite you. Much easier to just reduce people to single bits of information and follow what ever the cultural accepted stereotyping (ie discrimination) that the environment allow.

> For some reason for men its OK because all they do is work, but for women I'd rather my daughters have more human contact and nicer environment

Also what does this even mean?