Comment by atroyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atroyn | Hacker News Reader

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As a self professed good software engineer, you know that debugging requires explicit and implicit assumptions to be reevaluated. Here are some you've made that may be introducing bugs into your thought process:

- when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the evaluation is completely objective

- highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people dissimilar to themselves

- no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever experienced any

- women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and workplace is heavily male dominated

Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done.

Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what lever appears to be doing.

I didn't make these assumptions at all.

I born in a small provincial town in a poor third world country. There was literally no social support of doing programming because vast majority of people had absolutely no idea what it is (in 90s). I was doing programming completely alone!

To start coding you need: open a book, download compiler/interpreter, write a code snippet from the book, run the code.

To start competing in algorithm competitions: register by entering your email, read a problem statement, write a program, submit your program.

To start contributing to open source: download software, hack it, send a patch to a mailing list.

That's it, no social interactions involved. Yet I still don't see much of women among programming hobbyists.

I have no idea why women are not interested in CS. They just don't.

To any female feminist I prepared an answer - open a text editor, write a code, run it, repeat.

And please, don't talk about discrimination, I was rejected many times based on my lack of degree, lack of experience (when I just started), on my citizenship (when I started looking for a job abroad), on my bad Engish and many other reasons I don't know. And still, I managed to find a job in 4 countries with completely different cultures (UZ, RU, SE, NL).

P.S. I have different background and born in mixed family. You can't just fit me into your typical western political classes - left, right.

You seem to be an example of "This is not the diversity we're looking for."

The age issue being another important point. How many over-50s does Lever employ - of either gender?

To me, this looks like neoliberal boardroom feminism.

It's important to have the appearance of equality -

1. In certain selected job markets only. 2. As long as class-of-origin privileges are never challenged or questioned. 3. As long as the culture remains reassuringly homogenised, so there's no genuinely challenging diversity of cultural thought or opinion.

In younger startups it also seems to be very important that everyone appears to be having extrovert fun while all this is going on. (What about neurodiversity? Are introverts or Aspies not welcome?)

So when Lever says "poor cultural fit" isn't used as a reason for not hiring someone, the reasonable response is to raise an eyebrow and look rather unconvinced. The reality is more likely to be a different flavour of corporate conformity.

Which is fine if that's what you want. But it's also fine not to want it, just as it's fine not to accept unquestioningly that it's absolutely the best possible kind of culture for everyone.

"Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done."

which would seem to go against actively selecting people of a specific gender or trying to achieves a fifty percent representation of women or whatever.

I don't think anyone objects to the programming equivalent of a 'blind audition'. What is happening seems to be anything but a 'blind audition'.

But the problem here is that software engineers are not hired only for the quality of their final product - the evaluation is necessarily more complex and probably can't be done 'blind' since interpersonal interaction is so important.

My point wasn't to adopt any particular procedure, rather I meant that we ought to find similar experiments. This seems to be one of them.

Well, I was hired all the time just because of my pure programming skills. That's because I have zero soft-skills :)

P.S. HackerRank and Codility are doing great job to improve blind non-CV based hiring.

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