For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic | Hacker News Reader

For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic

wired.com

6 pointsvinceguidry9 comments

> More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the interview process.

Using statistics that lump "noticeable lack of diversity" into the same category as "inappropriate remarks" really undercuts the message. It makes the reporting appear dishonest and I had to read the rest of the article much more critically. It feels like someone wanted to start that paragraph with "more than half" to make the problem seem as big as possible, and then throw a run-on sentence in the readers face hoping they don't notice two issues of very different severity are conflated.

I would consider the ability to reject a job offer from a reputable company at age 18 over the tone of someone's voice to be more of a marker of entitlement than anything else.

Agreed. Either they need a better writer for this article to explain just how this tone was actually a problem; or, they need to focus on more useful details of toxicity than a story about the current “bassiness of someone’s voice”, or lack thereof, revealing they’re annoyed.

> They described instances where a male interviewer flirted with them during the interview, sent an unsolicited photo of himself, asked if they had a significant other, or made sexual remarks in their presence. The respondents also reported feeling dismissed or demeaned because of their gender. One respondent was asked why she would want to go into tech as a woman; in another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw herself becoming a software engineer in five years.

These quotes were taken from the article. The problem seems to be greater than just tone of voice.

And the HackerNews comment section is full of presumably mostly male programmers that complain about interviews, so it is fair to assume that people in general are unhappy about it. But this survey fails completely at establishing any sort of evidence or even indication of discrimination, since there is no control group.

Not to diminish the issue at hand, but your quote (or rather, what you left out) makes it sound worse than it is. The full sentence is:

> More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the interview process.

I considered leaving it in, but I figured it would be a trigger point for people to brush the rest of the sentence off as unimportant just because they didn't like one part of it. I'm not sure if you proved my point or if I inadvertently fulfilled my own prediction.

I’m sure the interviews can be toxic for young female coders, but unless you also pose the same questions to young male coders you can’t say anything about discrimination.

If you look at what people have to go through in 2019 for an entry level job at the coding fields, everyone hates it and it's not just 'toxic' for female coders.

Take a look at /r/cscareerquestions on reddit. People grind for 18 months at a time on leetcode and interview prep, like how rich suburban kids prep for the SAT, and then offer this advice up as the pro-tips others can use to get their foot in the door of a high prestige tech company.

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