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Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

My company has desperately tried to hire female candidates into our engineering team, which is currently all male.

From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5% were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women, we have lots of guys fail it too!)

So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked to thus far haven't made it onto the team.

Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!

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You may want to consider these posts by Gayle Laakman McDowell (who write "Cracking the Coding Interview") on possible problems with take-home exams:

http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-cand...

From her blog post on general interviews and take-homes:

http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews-are...

"Be fair to candidates. Balance the demand on their time with the utility you get from it. If you're giving a longer project, these should largely replace your interviews. Be aware that this means losing candidates who have other responsibilities."

(in the context of github and other outside contributions, but applicable in my opinion to take home exams as well): "You may really struggle with female developers here. They're more likely to have substantial family responsibilities (and thus can't do as much out of work)."

Same experience as OP here both on number of applicants and number of qualified female applicants.

Take home test results were considerably worse for females too and they had over five days to complete a simple thirty minute exercise.

There might be responsibilities that get in the way but IMO if you can't find a slice of time to work on something that came up then I'll be really careful in considering you for a job.

Shit happens w/o planning and I'd rather have people I can count on.

I agree, the inability to do homework would itself be a little bit of a red flag for me, beyond the quality of the homework.

It may be that the candidate doesn't want to waste time. There's a big difference between putting in some time on weekends and evenings for an important work issue that arises, vs doing some homework assignment that might not even get looked at.

I think this is one of the reasons Ms McDowell suggest doing the take home project later in the process, only once a candidate is promising, with a higher pass rate.

If you're using it simply to screen (i.e., if your pass rates are low), and the take home demands are substantial, you are likely wasting a huge amount of candidates time, in aggregate. This can legitimately harm a company's reputation among developers.

ISP network engineering/operational support software team here: People need to be able to find two hours of time (over a 5-6 day period) to complete a small take home project. When they do it and how they do it is up to them.

If somebody can't do this then they would not be a good fit to be in the on-call rotation where 1 out of every 5 or 6 weeks you could have alert emails and phone calls ringing on your phone at 3am. Sorry, but five to six nines statistical uptime over one year demand it.

30 minutes sounds less objectionable than what I've experienced.

The episode that turned me badly against take home tests involved a two-phase approach. Both were handled through a recruiter. The first was about a one hour set of questions (what does this code do, implement this class, explain dependency injection, that short of thing). That went well, so they then moved to a homework project they advised to spend no more than 5-7 hours on.

I did this, sent it back in and... crickets chirping. I called the recruiter (in house) every week or so to follow up. In about a month I got the standard "we've decided not to pursue your application further at this time.

I honestly have no idea if anyone even looked at it. I certainly never talked to a developer.

I can see how a 30 minute exercise could be a good thing, in that it could save everyone some time. Even then, though, I see it as a red flag if a company wants too much of my time before I talk to a developer in the recruiting process.

Keep in mind also, there's a huge difference between being available to work on something that comes up in a job, and shaking free 5-7 hours for a take home test that a company only might even bother looking at!

How does the top of your funnel work?

I don't know how your organization does it, but the three worst companies I've worked in diversity-wise all recruited about the same way: Word of mouth and some weak outreach through the easiest channels ie craigslist and a careers page on their own poorly trafficked site.

If your organization does on-campus recruiting, Society of Women Engineers and Women in Computing have well organized chapters at most tech schools, and simply telling them about your recruitment events can have a huge positive impact.

I don't have much experience with this issue outside the academic world beyond its results at internships, but there might be similar options around for general recruitment.

I don't know where you are but there are bound to be multiple woman-focused tech groups in your area. I'd encourage you to reach out specifically to those groups. A lot of times when companies can't find candidates who aren't the same as the rest of the company it's because they only use the same networks and resources that got the other employees in the first place.

I'm in Germany.

If you're not in Berlin (which we are not) it's difficult to find female tech groups unless it's at a university.

Start one! That's how all of them began :D

It certainly can be a challenge for all-male teams to find female candidates. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/HOWTO_recruit_and_retain_... has some excellent suggestions. How many of these best practices have you been employing?

> So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team

You could start by not talking about women like this. It makes you sound like a Ferengi.

You can't expect people to just apply. It's not a very good way to do hiring, regardless of diversity issues. You have to go out and find people. Go out and participate in your community. Find the people who are doing good work. And then make them an offer. Just waiting for people to come take your test is going to get you what you've always gotten.

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