> inclusive hiring culture and find exceptional engineering talent.
Thats a contradiction in terms. Building something exceptional always involves excluding mediocrity
Thats a contradiction in terms. Building something exceptional always involves excluding mediocrity
An inclusive interviewing process does not mean that you hire everyone. It means you reduce the weight of people's biases as part of identifying who you hire (because people turn out to be quite bad at prediction in hiring).
I hate when companies lie about that, it massively lowers my respect for them.
This leads to organizational pressure to hire based on population distribution. Doing so inevitably means hiring based on attributes other than skill.
- The companies that make an effort get a lot closer to population baselines than the ones that just give up.
- Organizational pressures are something leadership and management should be steering. I'd rather have hiring practices be an explicit choice than something that "just happens"
Let's say you are successful. Let's say a class of companies are successful at this strategy. Lets use the example of faangs which are desirable places in terms of salary/brand. If faangs were successful at this that would reduce the % of female developers in other industry and assuming faangs are taking the best candidates that leaves the worst ones. Which then creates this reality where male programmers outclass female developers in these other industries. That makes it harder for women in general and makes this false impression that females are not as good as males.
To help women you really need to treat them equally. Trying to reach a goal of unhealthy unnatural % industry wide means women will left holding the bag when the music stops.
But this also creates a positive feedback loop when more and more women decide to switch industries and pursue IT/Engineering jobs via bootcamps, college degrees, etc. I noticed the number of female candidates in UX/UI, fullstack, QA, Data Analytics - has increased in last several years.
Partly because the demand is still high for these professionals, partly because there is entire cottage industry of bootcamps churning out IT specialists en masse, partly these diversity hiring practices that opened up doors for women
They churn out ego inflated beginners who think they're experts.
The mentality peddled by bootcamps to sell their wares produces dangers "engineers" in my opinion.
I have no formal education, I'm not coming from educational elitism here.
I'm a bootcamp grad, and would not have gotten into the field if bootcamps did not exist. I'm about four years into my career now, currently working at a major well-reputed tech company, and haven't gotten an average-or-below annual performance review yet. (And one reason for that is that I tend to be cautious, critical, and thoughtful in my technical decisions.) There are a number of other people from my bootcamp class with similar results.
80%+ of the bootcampers were rubbish and shocked to be told their knowledge was way below where they thought it was.
A classic is a 6 week JavaScript bootcamp grad claiming to be an "expert in JavaScript" (their words) and couldn't explain the JS type system or basics of variable scope. That was the norm. That kind of rubbish.
I'm happy you're an exception and everyone gets a fair chance with me, regardless of background, but I am never shocked when I have to bin yet another bootcampers CV
If you mean "in my experience, bootcampers fail technical screens at much higher rates", then say that, instead of implying that you're stupid if you even consider hiring someone who went to a bootcamp.
If I could interview everyone I would, and I'd happily hire a bootcamper that seemed excellent.
The reality is that statistical likelihood of passing screening means those CVs often hit the bottom of the pile.
The two statements I made aren't contradictory
If your goal is population distribution then you are inevitably hiring based on attributes other than skill.
For example, women don’t make up 50% of the engineering talent pool so if your goal is 50% women then you have to lower standards to achieve that.
You don't have to. But you'd remove them from the job market, making the pool smaller for other companies. IOW, a few companies can target 50% women, but that'll make it that much harder for other companies.
We're always hiring based on attributes other than skill. If we're lucky and purposeful, skill becomes a part of the hiring process.
You can exclude mediocrity while also being exclusionary on other axes.
They are unrelated issues. In fact, I’ve even heard of exceptional people being abused/bullied for belonging to the wrong group to the point of being told “you couldn’t have done that” which itself is an assertion of their supposed mediocrity for exclusionary reasons.
Don’t assume you need to be bigoted to exclude mediocrity. Discriminating, yes, but not discriminatory against groups that inclusive hiring policies attempt to protect.
At least this is meritocracy, the kind of thing that people (e.g. eugenicists) can make a serious argument for.
> look like me, speak like me
...is something that can't be justified except by terrible people. Even worse is "likes the same music and movies that I do" or "we coincidentally have mutual friends."
I have bad news for you about the people commenting in this thread.
This is wrong by definition
US army was exceptional in 1970's, did you need to graduate from harvard to join? No, they drafted everyone, even your sorry ass didn't want to join.
British industrialisation was exceptional, they didn't exclude anyone, even got children something to do by sending them into coal mines!
Amazon is exceptional, is it hard to become a worker in Amazon warehouse?
Organisation can be exceptional without any individual being exceptional.
Also you could be exceptionally bad!
You are moving the goalpost from mediocrity to disability.
It's illegal to enlist anyone with an IQ below 80 to the military.
They don't have any use for them.
Approximately 1 in 10 people have an IQ below 80.