I'm an interviewer at my company and burnt out
dear.mariechatfield.com
dear.mariechatfield.com
The best compromise I’ve found is to have a dedicated person or team perform high-quality first pass filtering of candidates so that the engineers don’t waste their interviewing energy on interviewing any and every candidate. It’s an iterative process that requires constant fine-tuning. It also tends to have a higher false negative rate, so you’ll have to increase the number of candidates entering the funnel.
It’s also important to give interviewers an out to bail early on candidates who are obviously unqualified early in the process. Multi-stage interviews are good here, but you can’t drag the process out for too long. Avoid scheduling more than a 30-60 minute interview before you have a good idea that the candidate is on the right track. Don’t be afraid to politely dismiss a candidate halfway through an interview if they’re obviously not going to work out.
The second topic is more difficult:
> Am I complicit in a racist, sexist system?
If you’re not familiar with all the permutations of this line of thinking, it goes much deeper than you might expect. The pop culture definition of various -ists and -isms varies greatly from person to person. The fear of accidentally crossing into territory that might classify ones self as the “bad” person is a growing fear for people who grew up in the age of Twitter shaming and hyperbolic news stories about evil corporations. The pressure to avoid feeling like one is on the wrong side of history can lead people to make choices in a self-protective fashion rather than doing what’s best for the team or company. I don’t have a great answer to this, but it’s important to keep the dialogues open rather than forcing everyone to determine their own narratives internally. Those unspoken narratives can have an outsized influence on decisions if you don’t get ahead of it as a company.
How so? I mean I can certainly see why interviewing is not for everyone, but this really never crossed my mind. It's not like you know the candidate. Also you want to keep a good standard in your company, don't you? So why would this ever matter to you.
You don't have to know someone to have empathy for them.
Rejection can be tough for people. Especially those who get excited about the job.
You're trying to hire because you want to find someone to help you and you're hoping this next person will be the one to be that help. The person looking for a job obviously wants to find a job that will work well for them, and especially during this pandemic it's entirely possible that the stakes are higher for them than normal (do they currently have a job? Are they moving out of fear of their job going away? etc).
I think that it's entirely possible that someone would find it stressful to reject a stream of applicants - repeatedly telling a series of people, to their faces, knowing that they're people and not just faceless applicants, that it's not going to work out might very well be stressful to some people.
It's emotionally draining because there might be a dozen reasons you want to hire someone, and you have to mentally debate whether any of those reasons can outweigh their faults enough to let you say yes. But they can't, so you have to smash that person's hopes and say no.
It's also emotionally draining to try to confront unconscious bias. You have to tediously step through each link of your decision to say no and make sure that it's consistent with how you treat other people. It's important to do, but it does take some mental effort.
And at a certain point, when you've rejected 5, 7, 10 candidates for the role, it starts to feel hopeless. Are we ever going to find someone to fill the role? And yet you can't let that hopelessness bleed into the interview, so you have to take 5 minutes before the interview to get into "pep mode" so you don't let the interviewee realize how bleak you feel about their prospects of passing, and then to make sure you don't your hopelessness seep into how you review the candidate.
It really is emotionally draining. Especially if you're doing it once or twice a week, because there isn't enough time to forget about your last experience.
I've thought about this a many times with the hiring I'm involved with. There are some potential problems you can tackle internally, such as whether you have bias against certain types of candidate. However, the major blocker is one I really don't know how to solve.
Essentially you have to solve the underlying problem of, "How do you increase the number of qualified and diverse candidates in the hiring pool?" Since the pool of applicants for the jobs I'm interviewing for are overwhelmingly male, and the vast majority are White, East Asian, or South Asian, the candidates we end up hiring end up more or less matching people of those descriptions. I am somewhat encouraged that there are improvements happening in the gender split through, there has definitely been an increase in the number of women applying for our student positions, hopefully that translates to more looking for full time positions in the near future.
You can tweak the language in job listings, but you can't tweak away the fact that underrepresented groups are going to have way fewer "qualified" applicants when the qualifications include time spent in that industry.
I'd love to see tech make a push towards mentorship and a recruitment model that involves seeking out talented candidates who may be struggling to break into the industry. Maybe it requires reaching out to computer science departments or developing a system for training people in house. I don't really know, but I know that it isn't just a matter of finding more Black or women senior Dev applicants.
its like that in vancouver too but with far less money and even far less exits
This is illegal where I live; it is probably why companies never give interview feedback to the interviewees because they make these illegal hiring decisions behind the scenes but then say “it wasn’t a good fit”.
- evidence
- witnesses who are willing to testify
- legal action
Whether it actually happened or not is irrelevant.
Just like the photo of the C-suite of most companies being 99% male doesn’t count as sexism.
Your reading of this comment is "other stakeholders rejected an excellent candidate solely based on race". The actual information given was that the commenter really liked one candidate, and the other stakeholders preferred a different candidate who was somehow "diverse". While I think the commenter probably agrees with your interpretation, it seems equally likely to me that their candidate evaluation was bad, and that the other stakeholders did not use diversity as their sole criteria.
Join us in Alabama! Here, they put up barriers for everyone that wasn't a large landowner or industrialist. This set back descendants of black slaves, but descendants of white sharecroppers were equally caught up in the net. Arguably, the poor whites were worse off - every black guy realized they were being oppressed, but a good number poor whites had the wool drawn over their eyes.
If you've ever read The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, the best way I can describe it is it almost feels like being ta'veren. Even if I'm having an off-day, not performing well, doing the wrong things, saying the wrong things, I still get the results I need/want and it all works out.
If a company rejects me in favor of diversity, even my struggles are already relatively so easy to resolve that it's just like, good for them, I'll go to the countless other opportunities.
Not saying it's right or wrong, but I feel like the last person who needs a champion.
Being tall, or white, might give you an edge in some circumstances, in some places in life.
It does not put life on 'easy mode'.
It's tiring dealing with woke racism - this new world ideology is troubling.
Privilege is having parents who give you $20M - that's 'easy mode'. Otherwise, it's not.
If easy mode can be incredibly difficult...then maybe it shouldn't be called easy mode? Is juggling 40 balls at a time "easy mode" compared to juggling 60 balls at a time? Maybe, but it would be more appropriate to not call juggling 40 balls easy mode
Surely they know what you think you mean to say about White Privilege, but there's a special kind of authoritarian arrogance in assuming that the notion is settled.
Do White people in Poland, a country with essentially no Black people have White privilege? Or do they only gain privilege when there are sufficient people around them who may not have the same opportunities manifest themselves?
In which case, there clearly is no such thing as 'White Privilege', rather, there are some groups who simply have it harder than others and it's much more rationally described in terms of those who face discrimination, than those who do not.
It's like saying people in the suburbs are 'privileged' to not live in high crime areas, or that kids are 'privileged' to not be bullied in school, or 'privileged' to have access grocery stores nearby.
None of those things are privileges and we'd never describe them as such.
We would always describe those situations wherein a special, negative context applies i.e. 'lives in high crime area' or 'child is bullied' or 'lives 20 miles from the supermarket'.
'White Privilege' is a racist term used by intersectionalists wanting to weaponize issues of race, and project guilt or other groups who frankly have no advantage or privilege, other than in the most narrow of contextualization.
Although for what it's worth, I think you're misunderstanding the term. For instance: "There are millions of 'Tall White Guys' in prison, earning minimum wage, living on the streets. It's really not that much of a privilege." If you believe that it is a valid counterargument against the concept, then you have misunderstood the concept. It is not "the privilege that white people have". It is "the aspect of someone's privilege that comes from their whiteness". One may have many privileges. Being white is one of them. Particularly in America; I can't and wouldn't try to speak to the social dynamics in other countries.
> "It's like saying people in the suburbs are 'privileged' to not live in high crime areas".
> None of those things are privileges and we'd never describe them as such.
The only sense in which those are not privileges is the connotation of the word 'privilege' that it applies to groups of people instead of other categories. They're certainly advantages.
In terms of why life isn't easy for all tall white guys - being tall, and white, and a guy helps but it's not everything. Some example of how it helps: As a white person I've never had to worry about being pulled over by a cop for "driving while white". A couple years ago when videos of cops shooting black people for things like 'driving away from a traffic stop' horrified me. Obviously it's wrong to drive away from a traffic stop but I couldn't imagine a police officer responding with gunshots if I did that. So yes, my race does make my life easier here in the USA.
Some ways that tall, white, male isn't helpful: none of those things directly get me money/wealth. If I grow up poor I'm going to have a tough life no matter how safe I feel around the police. Being tall is nice, and it's great being able to use the top shelf in my kitchen cabinets, but it doesn't put food on the table (at least, not directly). Similarly, what if one grew up with abusive parents? That can really f*k someone up, and while it's nice not having to worry when I hold hands with my sweetie in public a history of abuse may make it more difficult to find and sustain positive relationships with the women in my life.
So yeah - being tall, and white, and male makes some things easier, but it doesn't fix all the problems for everyone.
[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-t...
[2] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-set...
[3] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/23/final-notes-for-lowes...
never had to worry about being pulled over by a cop for "driving while white"
Last spring, I was pulled over in Sunnyvale for expired tags (I paid on time; DMV was horribly behind) by an Asian officer.
While I was politely volunteering my documents and proof of payment, a second unit responded with a Latino officer.
They held me for 45 minutes for what should have been a wave-off. To justify their time, they wrote me a fix-it ticket (which required two trips to the courthouse and 5 months to clear.
Now, I'll wager that if the ethnicities were reversed, the average driver has been sufficiently conditioned by narrative to assume a racist motivation... even if pulled over from behind at night, where it's impossible to know driver ethnicity before the stop.
But if someone who was 'White and Tall' was 'Homeless on Minimum Wage' then that would directly refute the logic that 'Being Tall and White is Easy Mode'.
Just the opposite, it would indicate that 'Being Tall and White is definitely not Easy Mode'.
For me, just growing out my hair and beard, which give away my ethnicity, result in drastically different treatment. Same for attractiveness, if I wear contact lenses and make an effort to look a certain way, life in general becomes significantly easier.
Here's the hypothesis. If life is like an RPG, then whiteness / being male (in America) is a passive buff you get in character creation, like "+10 Social Points"
Truly, for many people, that still isn't enough to offset the many other debuffs life can bring.
I think its great to give personal anecdotes, but I never want to judge an individual person from their group membership. There will definitely be similar experiences across members of a given group.
I used to work for AMD some years ago[1]. At that time, there was no "woke" culture there. There was no discrimination that I could see. No one made a fuss about someone being from a minority and there were multiple people, not of the same gender, in my reporting hierarchy. No one ever spoke about that and we were busy with very interesting technical problems. So, if she were the CEO at the time when I was working for them, I'd probably have always regarded her with immense respect and it wouldn't even occur to me to bring gender into it.
1: Based on an opinion and experience from a few years ago, I'd have happily recommended them as a good employer. I do not know how it is now (because I haven't stayed in touch with the folks from there).
The researchers who study the fields he's referencing agree with most everything he said. Hell, a few of them even gave interviews saying he was about, "90% correct".
He was trying to help, and if Google had taken it to heart instead of getting butthurt, they could have used the useful bits and discarded the inaccuracies.
Diversity starts from the input stream. Are the recruiters sending a significant % of non-white & Asian male candidates and they aren't getting hired? Or are they simply not fielding those candidates?
I've been hiring embedded SW as well as EEs for 4 years. We're a small firm but out of 8 adds to the department, I managed to hire two women and promote one to engineering internally. I can say we have that preference (for under-represented candidates), but it remains the case that the vast majority of resumes are white and Asian men.
Why is there no societal wide calls for racial re-balancing in the NBA or NFL, or olympic sprinting competitions? Or gender re-balancing for military combat roles or logging in the timber industry, or elementary school teacher or veterinarians?
If it weren't, you'd see women lining up to become loggers, because that field is 93% male - possibly more.
The pairs were chosen mostly at random from the large development team, except that at least one would be more experienced with the company, typically.
The first team of two would get to know the person.
The second team would do a technical interview.
If the candidate did well by getting four thumbs-ups, they would often be invited to have lunch with members of the team they could be joining. Unless lunch went horribly, they would then meet with a director for the final interview.
Eventually the lunch part was skipped, but it was a helpful way to expose potential culture or tech fit problems that were missed earlier.
This process worked really well, with the exception of the candidate often having to explain some part of their background three times.
I’ve never been part of an interview since that I liked as much, and we didn’t wear out.
We did encounter one issue though. We had a few engineering team leads involved that happened to be women, and there were a few candidates that basically didn’t acknowledge them and would look at me or other men when answering the technical questions. It was quite unnerving to see it so blatantly.
Maybe it's due to how you wrote it, but this is a big red flag.
Firstly, lunch should not be an interview. Everyone enjoys themselves except the candidate who is carefully trying to navigate a high pressure unknown situation that's mixing professional and social expectations.
Second - "culture" is a bad word, it's loaded with bias. What "culture" are you exposing during lunch - that the candidate is vegetarian? Halal? Sober? Are you looking for someone "friendly" aka an extrovert?
Third - What are "tech fit" problems, and how are they identified during lunch? The candidate is busy trying to eat very politely and be friendly after a day of interviews, you shouldn't be expecting any technical performance.
Lunch is lunch. Give the candidate the option to take it on their own, or with a non-interview employee who's there to answer the candidate's own questions.
In my experience it's not difficult to find great minority engineers if you build a culture that is actually inclusive. Few companies really do that, large or small, and retention of minority engineers is abysmal at large companies.
There's also how you do the interview process. A smaller company should be able to do a more personal interview process and lean less towards metrics that can be scaled to millions of interviews. Top university is a viable metric but can you cast your net more broadly? Internships are good guides but can you do a code test or contract-to-hire instead if the candidate was too busy working manual labor during the summer? Can you partner with a boot camp to get access to their best graduates?
edit: Also, you want to ensure that your interviewers don't confuse blind confidence with skill. Imposter syndrome in particular seems to affect minority and female engineers which can be interpreted as a lack of skill even if they give the correct answers.
I don't mean to claim this is the biggest problem in the world. If a company thinks they can be a lot more inclusive of other people by being a bit less inclusive of me, that's fine in my book. But it's frustrating to see these kinds of cultural impositions described as though they have no costs or tradeoffs. Cultural mismatches are hard to handle, and we do ourselves no favors by pretending that the solution is obvious.
The largest cost is that certain people will simply not stop doing these things so you have to decide if firing them is worth the inclusion gains or not.
Focus on the merit of them, not the skin color, like Dr.M.L.K said. It's hard to force an Asian to be a NBA player, and it might be difficult to force some black to be a coder, they all have their fields to shine, I pick this just trying to make a point, you pick people by how good they are, not how their skin color looks.
In the beginning some team members thought taking interview was a pride. I wasn't taking any at that time. Later I got the job of doing it, HR sends the resume to my TL and he passes to me. Before the interview as a prep I google the guy and see if he has a blog or has any linkedin profile. Then I go on with the interview, 50% of questions I ask are from the work the person has put in his resume only. Other 50% are work we have in the team.
After having interviewed 30 people, I started guessing some are fakes, to confirm my guess, I push the person of second round technical interview which my team lead takes. Almost 100% of guess we're right. But at that time, I didn't know or thought about there would be people faking the interviews regularly. I have encountered twins fraud in my previous company that was shocking. During the interview, I hear turning pages, asking to repeat the question 3 to 4 times, could hear typing and clicking. Questions related to same subject is answered fast but different subject and going back to earlier subject responses were slow.
I started to setup the interview question like fundamental then based on experience. Worst part was, when I see some resume with person from top sort ivy league colleges, I get excited to interview them as I assume, they will be brilliant. One time, I had got such a resume, so I took my TL and one extra person as well to a conference room for interview, to say he was a gold medalist, I lost hope on gold medalists after that. It was quite a funny interview.
Out of 350, almost 250 were fakes. After knowing they were fake in 10-15 mins I still proceed to take interview to know what subject they are good in just to know as experience varies. On the last feedback just say where they have to improve on.
Worse thing is, when you find someone and hire them, they leave too soon due to pressure they say. Too much work.
I never take an interview during a burnout as this is a person's career. That's something serious.
But I have heard from friends and other places. People do hire persons based on caste, state, religion. Them being hired at high salary as well. I hear a lots of frustrations. I can't say anything other than THIS IS INDIA. There are people like that and it's hard to report or confront.
2020: Asian men [Chinese-Americans, Korean-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and immigrants from all respective countries] are not diverse
2025: White and Asian women are not diverse
2030: ???
Humans are not all equal in proclivities or even innate abilities.
The proposed solution by diversity campaigners is usually some form of discrimination, usually against white and Asian people. An Asian male has a much, much higher bar to cross to go to university, get a tech job, or otherwise than any other group, for example. It's discrimination and racism in the name of progress.
Equality of opportunity is a given, while equality of outcome is destructive and racist.
I feel forcing affirmative action is not the right move but claiming the group is blame free or shouldn't change anything is also I feel not right.
is the cause of this: "Certain demographics are less inclined towards certain jobs"?
If so, I would be interested in what sources inform this opinion.
There are enough claims of sexism that I think it's reasonable to conclude there is at least some sexism present. If you eliminated sexism and there was still a sex imbalance, no one would care.
There is a lot of anger arouns this issue, but when you actually talk to people, just about everyone wants the same thing--equality of opportunity.
This is true, but it isn't inherent to those demographics. I, as a male, was not inclined to ballet dancer as a child. That's not because men aren't good at it, it's because in my culture, male ballet dancers were gay, and in my culture gay was one of the worst things a man could be. So if women are less inclined towards software jobs, is it because all, or at least most, women don't have what it takes? Or because their culture doesn't encourage girls to study that?
> Humans are not all equal in proclivities or even innate abilities.
This is such an obvious statement that it doesn't need stating and yet you do, so I'm hearing this as you intending to use it as proof that some demographics are not equal in proclivities or innate abilities, in which case see paragraph above.
> The proposed solution by diversity campaigners is usually some form of discrimination.
This may be true. An improperly considered "diversity initiative" can very much be "hire the insert_whatever_here so we have enough of those people around here", which can feel discriminatory to those who may be more qualified but weren't in the correct demographic, and can feel patronizing to those who may be less qualified but got the job because they were of a certain demographic. But just in case you or someone else takes this to mean we should give up on diversity initiatives, we shouldn't. Failure doesn't mean give up, it means iterate.
> An Asian male has a much, much higher bar to cross to go to university, get a tech job, or otherwise than any other group, for example.
... what?
> Equality of opportunity is a given, while equality of outcome is destructive and racist.
When I read this I hear that the equal opportunity is to be interviewed, but equal opportunity starts at birth. Actually before birth. Does Jeff Bezos' children and a child born into the foster care system have equal opportunity? No. You may argue that the child born into the foster care system has good enough opportunity, and that's the American dream, that anyone can rise above their adversities and make something of themselves. In this case it's a mixed bag. Some do, some don't. You can hear success stories from all kinds of people, but to me it's more significant to look at the people who haven't and won't "make something of themselves" and see if there are patterns. Are certain demographics over-represented in this group of people who aren't "making something of themselves"?
Does that matter, at the company-doing-an-interview stage? Should a ballet troupe lower the bar for men to somehow "make up for" a culture that pushed out men who could have become talented ballerinos in a more just world? IMO that would be a lose-lose approach: bad for audiences, bad for ballerinos.
And what if it's not cultural, but a genuine difference in preference? Aiming to ensure men have an equal opportunity to do ballet is a noble goal. Aiming to ensure an equal number of men do ballet, whether they want to or not, sounds like a totalitarian dystopia.
> But just in case you or someone else takes this to mean we should give up on diversity initiatives, we shouldn't. Failure doesn't mean give up, it means iterate.
How much harm would these initiatives have to do before you'd say we should step back? When it's clear that some people are not getting a fair chance, of course we should step in. But this space is badly in need of something akin to the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.
This is a bad example that works against you, because the data says that wealth tends to evaporate to 0 after 3 generations, or even sooner.
Elon Musk came from South Africa from nothing. Will his children achieve the same height of success? Not a chance.
>what?
All of the Ivy Leagues consider race as part of admission in order to boost underrepresented groups artificially. This means Asian males have the highest bar to cross, while an underrepresented individual has the lowest bar to cross. This is inherently racist.
>But just in case you or someone else takes this to mean we should give up on diversity initiatives, we shouldn't. Failure doesn't mean give up, it means iterate.
Are you saying that just because your "diversity program" is explicitly and openly racist against Asians and other groups, you should double down?
>So if women are less inclined towards software jobs, is it because all, or at least most, women don't have what it takes?
That's a classic strawman argument. I've personally mentored and hired more than a dozen women. No, it means women are less inclined towards software pathways. Same reason men are less inclined towards being a beautician or in HR.
To even propose the idea that everyone is inherently the same is racist and sexist. You're tearing down entire identities.
Medical school admissions are the strongest example of this trend. Given the same MCAT score and GPA, Asian people are accepted at a rate significantly lower than average and something like half as often as the most favored groups. (https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...)