Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce

Is there much internal mobility at Facebook? My understanding is that the point of a single hiring committee is to ensure that every individual at the company has met a similar standard, which reduces the barrier to switching teams.

I've heard of companies without a common standard where switching teams is as hard as quitting and reapplying for the new job (complete with the beloved algorithms-on-a-whiteboard process), which seems silly.

If each team controls hiring you will end up with teams that have different standards for hiring. That implies that internal transfers will also need "re-hiring". It also implies that compensation may need to vary between teams.

I think it promotes fairness to have a committee of people who haven't met the candidate to decide on them from the details given by interviewers. This should be increasing diversity if anything as it relies on objective metrics rather than any hidden bias. The problems cited in the article are that committee members are focusing on where the candidate went to school, and who at FB can vouch for them. By trying to make sure new candidates resemble existing employees they will of course have trouble diversifying their workforce.

Allowing each team to customize their hiring process also makes hiring opaque and difficult to empirically tune.

> Hiring should be done by the team

This provides an incentive for hiring managers who are under pressure to deliver to throw away all corporate hiring standards and sign up anyone with a pulse.

That's just short-term.

Long-term this leads to divisions within the company where some teams are deemed "significantly below average" because of that one crunch time a few years back, causing cultural tension, which eventually forces good people out.

For the last bit this is a very commonly talked about idea, often referred to as "the pipeline problem". There is evidence that the level of which minorities graduate with CS degrees outpaces hiring though, suggesting that the pipeline can't be blamed alone.

The first part about why diversity is important has been covered ad nauseum so you can find those arguments and agree with them or not.

McKinsey claims that on average diverse companies outperform homogenous companies http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...

With that said, their survey includes companies across all industries, including those with a lot of customer face-to-face interactions (retail, banking, airlines, hospitality, healthcare). I am not aware of anyone narrowing down the research to tech/engineering field, so in absence of that the public just assumes that similar findings would apply to every industry, and diverse high-tech companies will outperform non-diverse ones.

Maybe you're misunderstanding these policies. Not only do these companies often discuss the pipeline problem publicly (and sometimes offer corporate support to address it), but as rhcom2 pointed out, it's not the only factor.

If it's not the only factor, then there's a chance diverse candidates simply aren't being reached by the typical recruiter strategy. So companies take that hypothesis and incentivize recruiters to diversify their search. Only time will tell if that hypothesis is correct, and this is the only point in the system where race/gender are under consideration. It has no impact on those that apply to FB through a college career fair, or through facebook.com/careers.

Respectfully, I think you may have missed the point of the article. In the committee hiring process that Facebook uses, it would seem that every candidate was actually not being judged purely on their capabilities. So telling folks to "distinguish yourself on your capabilities," while generally good advice, doesn't actually help if the process doesn't reward that.

If instead, as the recruiters in the article suggest, pedigree of college and other factors are being prioritized, then that's a problem. Criteria like this disproportionately disadvantages URM candidates in particular, which is how Facebook ends up with only 1% black and 3% latino tech workers, even after prioritizing diversity at the recruiter level.

> I don't think the decision makers are racist or sexist.

I recommend you read up a bit on [individual vs. systemic racism](1). An important point to note is that even if individual actors don't exhibit what you consider to be racism, the system that they make up can itself be racist. This is a really important point that often gets lost in discussions like this on HN, especially since the largely-white largely-male population here is unlikely to ever directly feel the effects of systemic racism.

> Trying to make it fair for one demographic will likely end up making things unfair for another.

Just to be clear, I think what you are trying to say is that adjusting for bias against URM candidates will inherently lead to bias or disadvantages to white folks. I would question any notion of "fairness" that relies on another group being treated unfairly. To borrow a common expression, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

(1): http://www.ucalgary.ca/cared/formsofracism

The article points out that Facebook recruiters seem to be able to bring in people through the funnel (tackling the supply-side) only to have candidates rejected in the latter half of the process when these candidates don't fit within the mold of senior engineers tasked with approving candidates.

The article portrays the opposite. They succeeded in increasing the supply but offers weren't made.

Bloomberg seems to fail to understand you cannot create engineers from ethnic minority overnight.

It might be sexist and racist to imply that there are not sufficient number of blacks, Latinos and women who might cross Facebook's bar compared to their proportion of the US population. You must adjust your eyes to see the possibilities than reality! :sarcasm

Most companies don't actually care about the race of their employees, and just want to make a good product.

But for the few that actually do care about diversity (and not the ones that just talk about it for show), I agree with you.

I don't think that's the lesson at all. The reality is Facebook is just way too late in the pipeline -- you can't just will more talented minority engineers into existence. It starts with education. Get more women/PoC introduced to CS and make sure the ones that show interest have tools to succeed.

> The other beef I have with hiring is the attitude "we only hire A players". Really? If you are doing work worthy of "A players" then that's fine. But if you aren't (and this is true in most cases), please don't pretend that you do cutting edge work and drop the attitude.

That's the thing, this is Facebook, arguably the A-player requirement is sound.

The issue is that departments have misaligned incentives, and each work to optimize their own : diversity figures is a major yardstick for HR, and the one by which they're judged. Technical managers optimize for teams that work and have exceptional problem-solvers in its ranks, which leaves no place at Facebook's level for other considerations.

The theory is that there's vast, intentional, discrimination against non-white candidates in technology. So the argument is that to counter that discrimination, companies such as Facebook must act to aggressively and intentionally recruit non-white candidates. Why? The argument is that it's to promote greater equality and fairness in terms of opportunities. The other common argument, which has been made frequently for at least several decades, is that increased diversity leads to greater innovation due to an increased diversity of backgrounds. In the several decades I've been reading about it, I've yet to see this last claim substantially proven in any manner (it would imply great leaps in innovation can't regularly derive from homogeneous situations (when in fact history constantly says otherwise), which would imply countries as different as Finland, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, China and Japan are nearly incapable of innovation due to their low diversity).

I think the idea is that an artificial means of creating a diverse workforce will allow people in traditionally disadvantaged populations earn decent salaries so that they can live in decent neighborhoods, and therefore send their kids to decent schools, then to decent colleges, then to decent jobs, where they can have kids and send them to decent schools ... eventually leading to the point to where that population does not need artificial means of creating a diverse workforce anymore.

Having grown up in an incredibly heterogeneous global environment, I personally believe diversity is good to have just because it helps break down the innate (my opinion) desire to stick to ones own group/type, which is often the source of much conflict in the world. I can't back that up with facts, just my opinion. I genuinely feel that I am a kinder/more productive/more flexible human being for having grown up in a very diverse environment. It's hard for me to explain why I think diversity just for the sake of diversity is absolutely a positive thing. At some point I'll have to hash it out and do some research.

This generic objection is off-topic on HN because we've heard it a million times and the guidelines ask us not to introduce classic flamewar topics without anything new to say.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The idea, as I understand it, for a lot of these diversity programs is: a) get more candidates of underrepresented groups to apply, b) if they lack some preparation other candidates are expected to have, help them get it, c) apply the same strict hiring standard to these candidates as to anyone else. Applying a different standard would be a disservice to the company, to the already represented group and to the underrepresented group as well (it is never a good thing to be at a role where you lack the ability to perform or learn to perform in said role).

The best companies don't and shouldn't have two standards. But point a) and b) are important.

As an example of a), a company can make an effort to reach out to graduates of traditionally black colleges, or expand their international recruiting efforts to countries that don't traditionally have a strong pipeline of sending candidates to US. Underrepresented groups also likely won't know other people working at those companies who can reefer them, since white and asian men already employed there will mostly have white and asian men in their circles. Keep in mind many hires come in through some form of networking, where represented groups already have a huge advantage in terms of getting the foot in the door, unrelated to skill.

As an example of b), most people graduating from Stanford and the like know to read Cracking the Coding Interview or similar before doing a software interview and know how software interviews work, graduates from other schools (places like my undergrad college) might need to be told about those resources. People not facing an stereotype threat might also be calmer during interviews, which helps. Now, the fix for the later is not to make the interview easier, but maybe providing or recommending mock interviews for people who haven't interviewed at similar companies before?

The idea is not to create two hiring pipelines: a hard one and an easy one. The idea is to get people to show at the start of the normal pipeline who would normally not even know that was an option.

No, it isn't. White and asian men are likely to be more qualified because they have had more opportunities to gain experience. The race and gender gap won't close without concerted effort to give similar opportunities to women and people of color.

Edit: I recently read that when women were first granted the vote in Denmark, they immediately introduced quotas to help more women become politicians so there would be equal representation of both sexes. A few decades after that, it was found that gender parity existed and the quotas weren't needed anymore, so now they're talking about repealing them. I hope for a similar future where affirmative action in college admissions, or gender-inclusion hiring policies aren't needed anymore because they worked.

No, it's still fair to currently represented classes (whites and asians). In practice this means exploring different networks, using different sourcing techniques, creating mentoring environments, etc.

> is like "affirmative action" version of pressure on a private entity, isn't it?

Yes it is.

> Why Diversity should ever be a goal?

Diversity of expertise makes for better decisions, but that's not what's happening here.

Putting priority on ethnic, cultural, diversity would make sense if these marked collectives have worse interview performance for the same work performance. I don't know if this is true and I don't want to discuss whether it is.