Google is going to court for the first time over alleged pay discrimination
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https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/04/google-found-its-underpaying...
I wonder what doors get opened if someone successfully sues for being underleveled.
Where I am working, my lowest level teammate is clearly among the most competent by most standards. The one person I'd delegate a task to and expect it to not just get marked as done, but actually get done. I have coworkers in the team multiple levels higher that might produce basically nothing in any 2 week sprint, and it's not because they are spending time in meetings and coordination: They just have minimal productivity. But getting rid of the worst is a major hassle, and the middling ones aren't worth getting a PIP. Other teams are in better positions to ask for uplevels, because they do more important things. Therefore, the only sensible approaches are to either take it very easy, lowering the performance curve, or changing teams/jobs to places where one can be upleveled properly.
It's not as if making it easy to fire and promote is a panacea: I've seen managers laying off their best workers because they were politically threatening, and teams getting little done that had everyone marked as a staff engineers. Ultimately performance is hard, and being bad at it, like keeping people underleveled for years, makes the organization degrade. Top paying companies like Google aren't immune.
The incentive for managers is to promote.
Perhaps if managers had budgets of dollars instead of budgets of headcount then the imbalance wouldn't be as large, but AFAIK companies do not do that except at very high levels.
She eventually convinced them to do a normal ACH payment ... but my impression was that people just randomly would give them full access to their banking history without even thinking about it.
Now add in the lack of privacy laws, and I'd be more than willing to bet that a company like Google has some kind of profile on your entire financial life (because apparently in the US, money-in-the-bank and empty credit cards means you are trustworthy) to determine whether or not they can trust you with "the secret sauce."
Is it really that dystopic these days or am I just really disconnected from it and it isn't that bad?
Edit to add: we haven't lived in the US in over half a decade.
OAuth exists, Plaid should not.
Always use ACH.
Granted, this gives Venmo a small amount of cash to theoretically make interest off-of, but to me it's worth not entangling it with the routing-numbers of any important accounts.
Many of the banks that own Zelle have it built into their banking apps, so if you use one of those you may have Zelle access without any extra credential entering.
The banks behind Zelle openly stated in Zelle's planning that one of the motivations behind it was liability shifting, away from the banks, on to consumers. Other benefits to the consumer are just to make the platform more appealing.
Credit card = your "password" is written on the card, and everyone thinks it's normal.
This is why scammers want people to buy gift cards or get banking details rather than just get them to hand over credit card numbers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_customer_authenticati...
Not only are there enormous protections with the mis-use of one's credit card, but the 'password'/card number is randomly generated and not used elsewhere.
A regular person is quite likely to reuse their favourite password for their bank login and therefore expose most of their other services when Plaid is inevitably hacked, or more likely, when someone pretends to be Plaid with typosquatting and the user has learned that giving passwords away is OK.
Not true. My mother got a free credit card that she never used and never even took out of her safe box, and a few weeks ago someone used that card to buy a Microsoft gift card. Luckily for her, she regularly checks the bank's statements.
I'm convinced there's a workaround to buy stuff using just the numbers, because that's how cards used to work a few decades ago.
I think it is the other way around, sorry.
The card number is visible in plain sight. The card number is reused everywhere. Merchant employees often have access to these numbers, and have reportedly used them illegally.
Yes, there are protections, but they often apply only after the fact, which can cause lots of problems, e.g. if you're traveling and reached your card limit. Also, not everyone checks their transactions at the end of the month, so many cases of fraud may go undetected.
Given modern security methods, credit card numbers are just plain silly, and yes, they may be even dangerous.
The number on your card is not a password to authorize payments - it is the account number to which merchants can send an invoice, but there's effectively no expectation that they'll receive the money if you don't agree to.
Things that can cause refusal that I know of include lying about your degree.
Up until now I only ever heard of this kind of check for military and national security adjacent positions, not done as a routine for generic positions.
Been there, done that. Took 12 years to "fix".
I don't think there is actually any science behind what you (or they) are saying, but I could be wrong (I didn't find anything definitive on Google Scholar, but I might be searching for the wrong thing) -- this smells like "it's the status-quo, so why question it."
Also, unlike the EU, if someone has your routing number + account number, they can literally just take money out of your account without your consent (with only a 1-2 days in which you can 'stop payment' on it -- once it is complete, you can never get the money back). At least with my EU bank (Bunq), if someone were to do that, I'd have 5 days to decide whether to approve or deny the transaction.
Is that not illegal? That seems like something that would have been made illegal back in the company-town days. Or at least for other reasons if it's not silo'd off.
Also, IIRC not having credit card debt makes you less trustworthy in the US credit system.
What I don't know is how much the hiring is 'blind', if they're aware of the resume or if they just get the candidates' interview performance.
This seems like a good case to make all of it blind. Once a candidate interviews they'd just be given an ID, and the aforementioned committees wouldn't know their gender/race/age/experience level at all.
It would likely prevent some bias, as well as protect the company in lawsuits.
Edit: this is probably a bad idea. A cursory search on 'gender effects on translations' shows that this would make it even worse (assuming that this is effectively translation).
Was it that study done on words known/unknown by gender? Interesting stuff
The reason is because the typical resume pipeline for an engineering position is roughly 90/10 male/female. If you take away anything indicating gender during the hiring process, in general you will end up with... a 90/10 mix. Which is decidedly worse than what these progressive companies are hoping for. The only real way to gain a more favorable ratio is to, well, introduce bias towards females in the hiring process (to overcome the pipeline factor). It’s why these blind hiring/review practices always fail — they don’t give the expected results.
What? That makes no sense. When I put up a job listing and I get 90% resumes of people who are under qualified, and 10% that are qualified, that doesn't skew my hire rate of under qualified people.
For example:
500 total resumes for one position. 90% are unqualified => 50 good ones. Assuming equal representation here, 45 of those resumes will be from men, 5 will be from women. You narrow it down to say 25 resumes for initial online screens (no voice chat so you can keep things gender-neutral!). Call it 22/3 male/female at this point. Second round, online again (there’s even been companies that have done voice changing during interviews so they can have real conversations!). Half get cut. Let’s call it 11/2 male/female now. How likely do you think it is that a man will get the position versus a woman? How likely do you think you’ll be to achieve a “good” gender balance in hiring over time using this strategy?
Agreed on gender/race/age. That should be made as blind as feasibly possible.
But, I agree that there are fewer checks and balances when it comes to leveling. The hiring committee is going to recommend a conservative level based on interview feedback and resume - they don't know the context of other peers in that particular org. It's up to the manager to push back or fight for the candidate if they're hired and outperforming (they can be re-slotted quickly if needed).
Point being: there are more checks and balances to ensure that women aren't being rejected more often than men, given similar background and interview performance - but it's not clear there are checks and balances to prevent women from being systematically under-leveled.
Another issue: the levels in this lawsuit are pretty high - L8 is equivalent to director, L9 is equivalent to senior director. We're talking about the top 0.1% of the company in terms of seniority.
The committees here would all be L9 and above, so basically all senior leadership in the company, which is less diverse than the company as a whole. Also, not nearly as many people are hired at this level, so the committees won't have nearly as many numbers to crunch.
My personal feeling here, having worked at Google, is that Google does far more than the average company to try to make hiring and compensation fair. That doesn't mean there aren't mistakes sometimes - but it's because individuals are still biased, and company-level efforts to minimize bias overall don't eliminate it at the individual level.
I have a very easy time believing that this particular individual was underpaid. That doesn't mean most women at Google are underpaid.