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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

On your site, you advertise that you give talks on HR and recruiting and every talk listed is on that topic. To be clear, "Cracking the coding interview" is a recruiting/HR talk even if coding is involved.

I wasn't there. I can't rule out the possibility that you a) didn't list this talk on your site, b) discussed a completely different topic than all your other listed talks and c) convey a completely different impression than your online persona.

But I hope you can understand why I, and many others, find this claim a bit implausible.

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Your analogy is strange. You realize I have never worked as a recruiter, right? This is the second time you've referred to me as a recruiter. I do things in the intersection of interviewing and technology space, yes, but I've never worked as a recruiter. I know you know that I'm not a recruiter, so... whatcha up to over there? Whatcha trying to prove?

This talk discussed coding at far more depth than the vast majority of recruiters could do. How many recruiters could tell you about big O time? Binary trees? Breadth first search? Not many.

Also, are you actually trying to argue that gender isn't a factor in how people perceive someone?

Tell me how you would like to brush off these examples:

1. Someone asking me at a conference exclusively for programmers where you MUST be a programmer to attend [there are no company booths or anything like that] if I've ever considered learning to code.

2. Someone asking me in my first week at Google if I'm new to marketing. This was in an office that was exclusively engineering. There was no marketing team there. I was just walking down the hall and said someone came up to say this.

3. At a small event where at least 50% of the people worked for Microsoft or Amazon, someone starting off the conversation with "So I assume you don't work for Microsoft or Amazon."

4. At an event which was very, very programmer heavy, someone walking up and saying "hey it must be great for you to meet all these programmers. At least you've got someone to fix your computer."

5. Someone referring to me at CES, where I was staffing the Google booth, as a "booth babe." (Keep in mind that CES doesn't really have booth babes, nor was I dressed at all like a booth babe.

6. Someone actually specifically admitting that he was surprised that I was teaching technical interview topics. He specifically said that he assumed otherwise because I was female.

7. On a technical interview video on YouTube, 2/3rds of the comments are either overtly sexual or overtly sexist (e.g., "I would've hit on the interviewer. I wouldn't be able to focus on the problems!", "Good tits").

This stuff happens all the time. Note that #1 through #5 had nothing to do with my working in the interview space. #6 and #7 is pretty clearly gender related.

Sorry, I should have been precise about "recruitment consultant" rather than "recruiter". Gives you a tangential and irrelevant point to hit me with.

As a person outside HR, I mentally lump the entire field into the one corner I interact with. I know it's technically wrong - once when I worked at a big company I met a non-recruiter HR person. But it's fairly normal.

Similarly, to non-tech people, I'm a programmer rather than a data scientist, and I used to be a professor rather than postdoc ("wtf is a postdoc?" "it's like professor but I get paid less").

Also, are you actually trying to argue that gender isn't a factor in how people perceive someone

I'm arguing that when a person who advertises themselves online as being in HR and gives talks about HR, it's plausible that people might perceive them as being in HR for non-sexist reasons.

Making the leap from "HR as a whole" to "the only part of HR I ever interact with" is just human nature.

> I'm arguing that when a person who advertises themselves online as being in HR and gives talks about HR, it's plausible that people might perceive them as being in HR for non-sexist reasons.

But again, the situation isn't "someone looked at my website and thought I was a recruiter" or "someone saw that I was doing hiring consulting and thought I was a recruiter".

It's giving a talk which is talking in depth about technical topics, far more so than the vast majority of recruiters could do, and then having someone say, "So when you were a recruiter at Google..."

This is just one little example. Not a big deal. Except that things like this happen all the time. You can't just continue to brush them off as "oh, well, it was just because you do this other stuff that the person didn't even know about."

I don't think it's fruitful to engage yummyfajitas in conversation. In my opinion/limited and indirect experience, he cares a little about being right, a lot about being provocative, and not at all for understanding experiences other than his own.

I've got to say I'm impressed how persistent you are in explaining the same thing over and over again to someone who clearly doesn't want to get it.

I'm glad you challenge people's stupid assumptions.

http://xkcd.com/386/

Apart from #5 where they may have been hitting on you (insert mental clicking sound) and #7 where the comment level is renowned for .. well adjectives don't really describe it enough, I can feel your frustration from the other side of the world. I'm (not so) happy to admit I'm guilty of making assumptions of woman in the tech space, and I mentally slap myself when I do. It's a pain when people make assumptions of you, being young I get it occasionally but no where near the level woman and minorities do. Given my occasionally short fuse, I'd probably snap once or twice a week.

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