Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer
betterprogramming.pub
betterprogramming.pub
I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They followed up with several phone calls encouraging me to attend.
I didn't want to go because I felt like the only reason they wanted to talk to me was so they could add another number to their diversity report. My Dad convinced me to go.
They had Native American speakers, food, performances and music. It felt so condescending.
On day 2 they had hiring managers from dozens of departments. It was like speed dating. One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." It felt gross.
One hiring manager handed me an offer letter when I sat down. She hadn't even spoken a word to me. She told me she had reviewed my resume and that was enough. WTF.
I got several offers from that event. I turned them all down.
I ended up getting a job at Microsoft. They didn't ask me about my race when I applied.
At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkward. Maybe they hire a couple more. Over time, the organization builds enough to overcome its own internal systemic bias and does have a strong local representative culture of Native American employees.
But I don't see how an organization gets to that point without it being sort of weird and cringy at first.
Of course, you are under no personal obligation to be the one to take those first steps simply because you happen to be a member of that group. But I have to wonder, if we're going to criticize an organization for trying to correct their biases this way... what other process would we suggest?
If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places.
To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.
The cycle continues.
Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in the cold, etc etc.
It’s a tough nut to crack but trying to fix historical bias isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
And then it was all tramped on by some insane incentive like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a particular person actually gets to hire. Or a stack ranking based on the same.
All it takes is just one perverse component in the mix.
Certain groups need the chance to prove themselves. If certain groups aren't fairly represented, then it does pay to prefer to hire from those groups when everything else is roughly equal.
I do find it hard to believe that "the best" candidate is more often than not a straight white man.
I remember reading someone's opinion basically stating that things like that for underrepresented groups are unpaid emotional labor, which I kind of agree with - it's got to be a weird position to be in to be hired to write code and somehow end up as the defacto sounding board for questions regarding the company's interactions with people similar to you. Imagine having randos come up to you and ask you for your time to pitch new ideas for how to recruit white dudes or asking questions about how it was growing up a white dude or even just people making the assumption that since you're a white dude you care about hiring more white dudes.
> what other process would we suggest?
Personal opinion alert: I feel like a lot of (not all) tech's diversity problem is a pipeline problem so maybe identifying people that belong to underrepresented groups out there doing good work getting folks from the group interested in cs/tech and then giving them more resources?
Presumably if the person in question is salaried and it's understood that they are spending work time on this, then it's not unpaid emotional labor. But, sure, it's work that requires leaning on emotional and social sensitivies one might otherwise not have to bring to bear in their tech job.
I don't think anyone should be obligated to do that kind of work because of their background. But my experience is that organizations and culture often progress only when some people do volunteer to do that work. And, fortunately, there are many people who choose to do that because the intangible rewards, for them, outweigh the costs.
I imagine this all the time, yet it never happens.
Society has developed other mechanisms precisely because orgs are dumb as shit at handling complexity.
Its sort of like encouraging 2nd graders to think about 10th grade problems. They need a whole lot of help and time from someone else before they can. Thats why the East India Company runs to King or Goldman runs to the President or Jack Ma evaporates from the earth when things get too complex.
Orgs are just dumb simple parts of society like the ribosome is a part of a cell. Expecting the ribosome to morph into something it is not just because every part of the ribosome has good intentions and feels it can be doing much more to influence the behavior of one cell, or a clump of them and therefore the whole body makes for a good Pixar movie and Google hiring material. But in real life that stuff happens on very different time scales and by very different institutions.
If you want to change the world don't work in the corporate world. Work in places that supervise them.
- Better if it is not the corporation organizing it, but just sponsoring either trough financial contributions or things like providing space instead.
- Have interesting topics beyond just talking about group X.
- Don’t assume everyone within a group is the same.
- Actual hiring/evaluation process should be same for everyone, do as much blindly as you can.
Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity.
I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity during a co-op tour and had posters of Africa all over the room. But why would I expect someone who just learned the term to actually grok it?
Bummer you go the offensive end of that.
EDIT: From the article "It was when I first realized that tech leaders have no idea what it is to manage work dynamics through a gendered lens."
When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion.
Which is why the entire concept of demographics-based "diversity" is such a shambles. The premise is supposed to be that if you get some women and minorities in there then you'll have a diversity of opinion.
But then you select for the women willing to work 80 hour weeks, which is highly atypical and selects out e.g. prospective mothers, ensuring they're not represented in your organization. You select for the minorities with degrees from prestigious schools which selects out people who know what it's like to grow up poor.
You end up with diversity on paper but not in practice, which is not only useless but worse than nothing because it creates the impression that you now have a diversity of opinion and you don't.
The example I like is which would be more diverse in a silicon valley tech company - 1) an African American guy who grew up upper-middle class and went to an Ivy League school and always voted for "progressive" candidates or 2) a white guy who grew up poor in West Virginia, was the first to go to college and has an affinity for right wing politics?
No one was self-made. If you hired in mid-career you were seen as different and if you brought a different point of view they just nodded their heads and basically ignored what you said until you came around to thier point of view. The most non-diverse environment I have ever seen.
I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572082239488...
I also always took the "ambassador" to be an external facing thing. They speak for their culture at that company; the places I've seen it I was never given the impression that they were meant to be an ambassador for their entire culture. Maybe I was misreading it, though.
Then they company has a personal responsiblity to change rather than a checkbox to check off , much like the "what race are you" checkbox given to pander to their diversity quota.
I blame society, people cry about diversity but all they want to see is someone of a particular type in a manager position and never really as, "what is this person doing", "do they really get to make an impact". Diversity propaganda is all so shallow and has only made relationships different cultures worse.
Also you: "You pretty much have to make it non profitable for companies to not be diverse."
/facepalm/
This reminds me of a VC/incubator who was offering a favorable equity loan hybrid where you get no strings funding with the additional benefit that you can buy your equity back at any time for 3x the original investment. It turns out that this met the needs of a lot of black and female founders even though diversity was not even an explicit goal. You could literally feel the HN commenters roll their eyes while they said "So this is just a terrible loan with high interest rates?" as if having access to business loans is completely natural like breathing air, when it's the exception for black people.
In the 20 years I've been working in tech, I've seen countless candidates rejected because of "culture fit." Of those, the majority were women; but also black, Hispanic, and indigenous men. Only one was a white guy: he was overtly sexist towards every woman he encountered, including the HR recruiter.
Edit: oh, I forgot one. One white guy was slightly effeminate by north American standards, and wasn't considered after somebody made a comment to the effect of "I think it's weird when men wear scarves". I think he was French (or Québécois), and I wouldn't speculate about his sexuality
I think you mostly have two scenarios:
1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. I suspect this is what most people believe is happening.
2. An employer has zero/little bias in their hiring practices, but the people most suitable for the job happen to not come from some minority (due to any number of reasons or issues). They then turn down the most suitable candidate to hire a less suitable minority to make an excel sheet somewhere look right. I suspect this happens all of the time.
A real life scenario is a police department in the UK who were slammed by management for having only one black officer in their local unit. When they went away and crunched the numbers, they found that the one black officer they had actually over-represented the percentage of black people in the local community.
As I've said many times before, we really need to make a decision about equal opportunity vs equal outcome. You can't have both. Unequal outcome is _not_ direct evidence for unequal opportunity. I think currently society pushes towards equal outcome under some delusion that eventually they will have both equal opportunity and outcome.
Employers never actually discriminate on anything anymore. Instead, they let the recruitment firms do all that unpleasantness for them.
I thought we were using the comparison of societal demographics to company demographics to measure how true the "equal opportunity" statement was. You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. Having looked at those numbers and found them to show bias, I delusionally thought that maybe we had looked at causes and effects, and found feedback loops like are present in so many complex systems.
Get this though - in the grandeur of my delusion, I thought that studies of these feedback loops we had found:
* people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves
* people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo
* complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally
And that these hiring practices were part of a bigger attempt to use the third bullet to address the other two.
But what do I know, I'm just a delusional fool who gets paid to work on complex systems. I should probably go resign. Anyone reading this - likely another person who works on complex systems - I encourage you to not apply your systems thinking to systems, you might end up delusional too!
This is a false analogy, it robs people of their agency. Humans do not act with some uniform distribution. It could be cultural, social, environmental, class - any number of factors. People are different and these differences should be celebrated, not squashed and ironed out.
> people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves
> people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo
> complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally
Sure, but at what point have we biased the input enough? At what point do we except the result? Bare in mind for example, women were among the first programmers (computers). If we achieve equal numbers of men and women in programming roles, what makes you believe the situation won't once again become biased?
What concerns me is that equal outcome is a goal without any real measurement of success or plan to revert back to equal opportunity once the input has been 'corrected'.
I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.
This is the first time I've heard of this push-back.
I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?
I recently heard a radio interview where the guest explained that part of her character was "blackness", and she was offended by intimations that her character could be separated from her racial identity. (The context was a caller who had recited MLK's famous line.)
Taken at face value it necessarily implies a partial refutation of some of MLK's premises, and indeed of some of the premises behind the mid-century Civil Rights movement and even the American Experiment. Suffice it to say MLK can hardly be said to represent the sentiments of all black Americans, let alone all Americans.
That said, there's a ton to unpack there, and decades later many of the concepts that we as a society are implicitly discussing are quite different, such as what we mean by "character". (I seriously doubt MLK had a sense of self that was any less black than the guest speaker.) So the two sentiments may still be reconcilable. Certainly I don't think the guest's expression of her opinions would have been as well considered and articulated as MLK's. (Ditto the caller's.)
YMMV.
If by “is relatively new” you mean “very briefly receded before returning”, sure. The whole “we are living in a post-racial society” thing was trendy for about the second half of 00s, but fell apart fairly rapidly in the early 2010s.i
> and orders of magnitude more controversial than its pushers like to admit.
No one, anywhere, disputes that it's controversial, and always had been; what has changed notably, though, is the degree to which the divide had become much more aligned with the partisan divide than it had ever been in the past.
Lots of people agree that color blindness would be the ideal world, but seeing that the world is not color blind, trying to advocate for it seems like a way to continue pushing an injustice instead of addressing it.
If there are biases upstream of that point in the process (such as "those with a social security number ending in 9 are admitted to law school at one-sixth the expected rate"), then I'd expect an unbiased hiring process to result in that same discrepancy in those hired (presuming here that social security digits are entirely uncorrelated with performance in law school and the practice of law).
Should the law firm work to try to eliminate that upstream bias? Sure. Should the law firm work to hire in a biased way such that they end up with an evenly distributed outcome? I personally don't think so, but I understand others who think they should.
If there is some other bias present, the solution is to rectify that bias, not force diversity hire. Forcing diversity hire is a lazy solution, a way to *not" actually fix the cause of the problem.
It's always seemed to me that people are aggressively attempting to hire for some criteria (even position) because they're either having trouble getting people on board, or holding onto them. There's something 'wrong' with them, for some definition of wrong.
Either they're looking in the wrong place, they're giving off a bad vibe that scares people off, or people who have that quality they're looking for are leaving at a higher rate than everyone else.
Why is this team trying so hard to hire team leads? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring? Why doesn't this team have any women? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring?
My guess is you would find out pretty quick why there is nobody quite like you at those companies, and soon they'll be fishing for your replacements.
If that's true, then it's not just an offensive strategy, it's also ineffective for the business employing it. It's a way to select the lowest performing of a target group.
Hell, I’m mostly learning software dev because it seems like the most straight forward to way to turn my above average intelligence in to money. I’d love to cut out the middle man and just receive a high iq allowance.
It's the Diversity & Inclusion Industrial Complex and it's related to all the other "industrial complexes" that form in that it's just a problem/industry specific manifestation of the Shirky Principle:
Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable? This is not something that is stealthly flying under the radar, it's pretty much in the open and celebrated. What moral ground will anyone have to stand on should the pendulum swing the other way, which it always eventually does? Instead of attempting to create equality, we've instead continued playing the same old game but with different winners selected. How long will the current chosen winners continue to be the winner? And when things change to other selected winners, how will anyone be able to complain when they supported the concept of selecting winners as long as those selected were the ones they favored?
The difference was that it wasn't based on race. Eligibility was decided by a mental health diagnosis, and successful applicants also received specific coaching that is better tailored to the way they think.
Not having those things would have made work far less bearable than it was, as it had been for me in the past.
And while I do believe that Microsoft wants to hire people from diverse backgrounds, I personally found that the workplace support was a legitimate material benefit to me. I did not feel like I was forgotten about just because I now contributed to some organizational diversity makeup. Parts of me that I consider my "identity" change the way I experience the world in significant ways, from the perspective of mentality and the senses. I continued to receive assistance for those things provided by the company, for years, and as a result was more or less successful at living an adult working life.
If hiring candidates are preferred because they have a certain background, in a lot of cases it feels like it's not for a reason that makes sense except to reach a quota, but in my experience there are exceptions. Or programs that feel like exceptions, at least.
When I ask what the most challenging problems company’s are facing and they mention PC stuff, then I know it’s not a place for me.
I’m also mixed race, part Maori and I had a guy in an interview tell me that “white guys like us don’t add diversity to the company”.
These social justice warriors can go fuck themselves.
While "diversity via token hires", and "faux-diversity celebrations with folklore food, music, etc" are fake-ass and crinzy, I don't see the manager's question as gross.
It's a legitimate question a human being can make to another. We're not just individual snowflakes, we're also people with certain traits and members of certain cultures with certain histories.
It makes sense for someone to ask us about those aspects of our life.
Of course, perhaps the way he did it was patronizing or fake, or whatever.
But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such...
If the applicant was white, should the manager have asked them; "Oh wow as a half Italian/half English person , how was to grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey, was it difficult? Was it hard? Gee I cannot begin to imagine how strong you are"
Well, I'm not American - and like many other cultures that aren't exactly black but just aren't WASP, my people weren't even considered white by Americans.
But I see no problem with "otherizing" you seem to fear so much. Is it an American pre-occupation, that every ethnic person is necessarily just a good-old American, with no distinction or unique experience coming out of an all-american melting pot?
And if you acknolwedge that an Italian American or an Native American, or an Asian American, etc could have different experiences growing up in the US because of their ethnicity/heritage you're "otherizing" and that's bad?
What the duck is wrong with a culture so afraid of discussing these things (except in adversarial tones: X are evil, Y have privilege, mentioning Z is otherizing, asking K is patronizing, and so on)?
>If the applicant was white, should the manager have asked them; "Oh wow as a half Italian/half English person , how was to grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey, was it difficult? Was it hard? Gee I cannot begin to imagine how strong you are"
Depends of if whites had it bad statistically, or perhaps whites from some specific area. I'd sure ask whites from Alaska say how it was growing up there, or italians from the Bronx in the 30s, etc...
Really? Consider it this way, by substituting x for something that fits for you personally:
What was it like growing up x? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you."
How might you feel by the end of the flight?
I don't see absolutely any problem with that. In fact it's something we talk about frequently in casual discussions.
Sure beats BS casual talk that means nothing. It also gives you the opportunity to give the other person an idea about x (e.g. my ethnicity).
Perhaps it's about different ways societies see casual talk?
I'm in Canada. In the job applications, we don't even have a section to specify ethnicity. When I applied for American companies, I felt a slight cringe when I saw the optional form asking me for my ethnicity, sexual orientation or veteran status for statistical purposes.
You were right though that they were trying to check some boxes on a diversity report. IBM trots out those special events at trials to try and paint a favorable picture of their hiring practices - and if that doesn't work they just don't pay the judgements.
Completely contrived, but personalized, introductory events.
The difference is that they eventually took the job and have no issue performing on the job or have any stranger than usual corporate experiences.
(They experienced the same super long interviewing and matchmaking process plaguing the rest of the industry, and the contrived intros were just the silly responses to how to deal with the recruiting pipeline).
These were not right out of college though, and they would have likely gotten responses within 24 hours from the same companies anyway.
IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity & inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun culture, belief that it will make the company more money.
I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the business by helping the business make better decisions, helps find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those things boil down to: it's good for business.
This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an employee that you only care about their ability to help the business make money. But there's also something really unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the business cares about an employee's happiness and positive social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the employment in the first place, which is making money.
I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less competition from other recruiters."
That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true, especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage that allows you to take advantage of industry bias. Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much opportunity.
It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we think you could out perform your past work by a lot."
I don't really understand this. Isn't any kind of race based discrimination going to potentially cause legal liability? At the end of the day you're advocating for a policy of race/gender based discrimination, and I don't really get why you'd think it wouldn't be opening yourself up to liability with programs like these?
Have you actually talked to a lawyer about this? I've looked into in the the past, and while it seems to have a stronger case in Canada (where I live) I haven't really seen anything to suggest it's legal in the US unless you're a school.
Admittedly you're probably not going to be the case the brings it tumbling down, but it still seems like explicitly basing your hiring decisions on race open you up to a whole lot of potential liability.
I get the intent, but it seems so incredibly forced and to your point, condescending for someone who busted their ass to get where they are in their career.
How does that even work? Even if we restrict "Native American" to groups that were native to what later became the United States, that's still a whole lot of different cultures across a vast range of ecosystems.
They had different foods and different kinds of music. How could IBM pick which Native American culture's food and music to have? Wouldn't any such choice be essentially foreign food and music to people from other Native American cultures?
Not to fully doubt you but your entire story seems highly unlikely and politically convenient.
Considering the genocide of Native Americans in America, the lack of reparations and the amount of US government monies paid to IBM, native peoples should be rolled to the front of the line YET still hired solely based on their merit.
Rich executives’ kids are rolled to the front of the line for internships, entry level positions and college admissions.
Making sure that natives are considered is the least we can do in making the world more just.
This isn't sexist. I've been told this, and I've told this to junior engineers of both genders. It's not even just a stretch to claim it's sexist, it's ridiculous to. The remark about prioritizing is actually more troublesome, and entirely independent of this comment.
"Some things went well, others not so well. I am not giving you a list specifying each. It has nothing to do with your technical skills; that is normal to have room for improvement. We just feel there is a lack of chemistry with the team."
This is just the way things are, especially in tech. It's not sexist, it's just unfair and dumb and political. And it's applied to all individuals. I've had it applied to me. I've been in management conversations on how to approach others to apply it to. This just isn't sexist.
"Carl is a difficult person to work with. But I trust in you to accomplish this. You will use your feminine approach and you’ll be fine."
"Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature, and there is nothing we can do. I see it in my children: While my son prefers video games, my daughter only cares about Facebook."
These are both sexist. The first one is disgusting and might also border on sexual harassment. The second is a gross demonstration of "anecdotes are not data."
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>This is just the way things are, especially in tech. It's not sexist, it's just unfair and dumb and political. And it's applied to all individuals. I've had it applied to me. I've been in management conversations on how to approach others to apply it to. This just isn't sexist.
I think what you're missing is that the reason a statement like this was visited upon you, or whomever poor soul you visted upon in turn, may not be sexist in your case but perhaps so in the author's.
Precisely as you point out: it's dumb and political. The reasoning isn't going to be good and it's going to be opaque. Well, sexism, racism, etc are dumb, political, and opaque.
'Perhaps' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I'm convinced social media is raising a generation of mind-readers.
sidenote - it is still, after more than 2 decades here, amuses me how people are allowed here to be "difficult to work with". Back in Russia - i was an engineer and later manager there - we didn't have "difficult to work with" persons, at least by the end of the first week of employment of any given person.
The second one doesn't even support the premise. Video games aren't more "technical" than Facebook.
I understand the argument you're making (that in this context it's sexist, even if it's not sexist in other contexts), I just completely disagree with it.
Personally I believe these "quotas" systems hurt more than they help, if you don't subject people to the same high standard test they don't improve, because they don't have technical challenges to overcome. That's why I never participate in them
Well you're not supposed to say that though there may be some differences between the sexes. Like myself and my sister fit the stereotype.
Eventually you ignore it. When someone says something stupid, you rationalize it and move on. After all, you are only just here to do a job.
But then you get angry. You are angry at everything. No one understand why you are angry or why you blow things out of proportion. "Hey Carl didn't mean to offend you. It was just that one time." What they don't understand is that you've been hearing the same stupid jokes or comments for 15 years in your career.
In June of last summer, multiple companies contacted me to help them do something about diversity in their company. Here is what every company is excited to do: Diversity day, minority day, rainbow flag day, Awareness, BLM profile image, hashtags.
Here is what was incredibly hard to do: Hiring more black people. I interviewed hundreds of black people on their behalf, many highly qualified for the jobs. Not more than a 10 candidates got a reply for a follow up. So far I only know of one who was hired.
It's not like there's a large, untapped pool of talented black software engineers.
I'm at a large tech company. There was a team I worked with for a big with some really talented people, the sort of team where really smart domain experts go. There was a black guy on it who asked questions showing he wasn't an obviously talented domain expert. I found out he was recruited for coming from an unconventional background and was spending time with different teams.
Large tech companies are trying really hard to finds diamonds in the rough, and they're taking chances on people that aren't talented enough.
The other issue is blacks are only 13% of the American population. Seattle is only 7%. Now imagine you're an even smaller minority. It's about people not being assholes, not "hiring more x people" because that will always fall short for some group.
Increasingly I believe the problem with diversity in tech is a retention and training problem, not a pipeline problem. If you’re a woman and you want to be a coder but all you hear about is hell stories, why would you sign up for that major? Our job is to make those who are generous enough in spirit to decide they want to do this thing, in spite of all the pain they might face, the best coders they can possibly be. Only then will they be able to provide the positive reinforcement necessary to improve input pipelines.
Same applies to any underrepresented group.
Tangentially related: when I got a new tattoo a few years back at an artist I never been before I made some joke that tattoo artists are like dentists: they love to inflict pain on people. I immediately realized that he must have heard the same hundreds of times before, and that I said something pretty bloody stupid.
You're up close and personal for a few hours with a stranger; I'm not shy or socially awkward, but I'm also not especially outgoing; just average. Sitting in silence can be awkward for some human psychological reason, and you feel the pressure to say ... something, anything. Reflecting on my own behaviour since this, I've noticed it's in those kind of situations where I say the silliest things: when you feel a pressure to say something but you're not sure what.
I think many probably have the same experience to some degree getting a haircut or the like (although haircuts usually don't take 3 hours; or at least, mine don't).
I'd certainly like to think I wouldn't be the kind of person who would "the same stupid jokes or comments" that you mentioned – but I can point at least to once case where I've done so. There are probably others that I've forgotten.
My point is that it's hard to understand how something is perceived by someone else, especially when their experience is very different from yours, whether that's a tattoo artist or a black programmer.
An idea I had a while ago is a platform where people can post personal stories to expand on these kind of things and how it's perceived by them (about a wide variety of topics). "I didn't mean anything by it" comes off as rather weak, but it's my impression it is actually true in quite a few cases, especially these relatively minor ones: many people just don't understand what it is to be in the shoes of another person. You really need to explain this, and just saying "that's racist" isn't enough.
P.S. Don't get your ribs tattooed people. Good grief that one hurt so much more than any of the others.
Honestly, I feel like I received more discrimination as a white, western European in the US than you did.
When I was still working in a university lab in the US, it was extremely diverse, with a strong bias/over-representation of Chinese people. But it was still diverse in skin color, heritage, religion, sex or whatever. I never saw any "insensitive comments" there, at least none that were meant in a bad way.
What is the point of bringing this up - is this thread the oppression olympics/"Four Yorkshiremen" of discrimination? Do I have a bit for you: White, western European, you say? Try being an immigrant as a black, African in tech - I'm sure I had it worse than you, at least you people assume you had electricity growing up.
As you can imagine, it takes longer than I'd like to establish trust in my engineering chops, and this is an additional consideration when changing jobs.
$current_company runs internal events and makes noise about leadership bonuses being tied to diversity targets. I'm part of $targeted_minority so I usually show to the relevant zoom meetings. There's recurring meetings but no actionable items emerge from these meetings.
In a way I'm alright with this because some people need the meetings as a coping mechanism but it doesn't fix the underlying problem; bringing in more $targeted_minority does that. What's missing: data about internal hiring/promotions/referrals showing whether $targeted_minority has a funnel problem. Maybe those reports are above my pay grade at this company. For some anecdata I've made over 30 referrals and not one has been hired. At $previous_company I made 6 referrals that turned into 4 offers and 3 hires (and one of those referrals walked away before being made an offer). Sure, $current_company has higher standards but I'm a bit incredulous at the success rate gap.
Maybe one day they will give up and pad the numbers with marketing/HR folk, etc. and pat themselves on the back. Maybe they already do that and I just don't know about it.
I'm curious what items are actionable that also don't run afoul of equal protection (i.e. don't discriminate based on a protected class).
My general observation of D&I in the years since it has become a corporate department at many companies is that the D&I department never sets specific and measurable target goals. They say they want to increase representation, but that's where things generally stop. Sub-metrics and sub-goals that would move the needle are conspicuously absent.
If you don't have specific and measurable goals, how do you know when you've solved the problem for which the D&I department was originally formed to address?
I think is important to talk about because insensitive comments aren’t always clear. Finding a good way to talk about comments in a healthy way is the difference between me having more peace or stewing.
Sometimes people don’t know what they’re saying is offensive, sometimes I misperceive something.
An example is that I was in a staff meeting and one of the seniors said “Paying for itself in spades...” and another developer’s face just sunk and he was clearly upset but the senior didn’t notice.
Dev2 went to a colleague to talk and explained how he was really upset because Dev1 uses this term quite a bit and that it’s offensive. Colleague pulled up some info on the origins of the term [0] and how it has nothing to do with race.
If Dev2 hadn’t talked about it, then they would have continued thinking that Dev1 was saying racist things.
Obviously, the particulars of situations will vary and there are jerks. But given that we work with lots of different cultures, it’s good to try to find a way to confront these offenses in a way that’s not exhausting and can help build team relationships.
In some organizations I’ve been in, he could have talked to Dev3, who tells them to “not be so sensitive”, then tells other devs about how Dev2 played the race card.
Dev3 is more common than Colleague. Hell, Dev1 being an idiot and not learning to maybe adjust his language to be inclusive, and maybe read a book about race, is less common than Colleague.
I get called dipshit and you get called the N-word. Why race-based bullying has suddenly become considered worse is beyond me.
That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it.
When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other ones. Are they there because of skills? Could be, could also be HR wanting to push diversity? Also possible.
Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech recruiters that's tied to a bonus. So at every "diverse" hire you encounter you have to ask yourself: are they here because of skills or because someone was one hire short of cashing out their bonus?
Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent.
During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than historically comprised their body, but they were from everywhere. It turns out musicians didn't want to be reduced to bigoted demographics, so it attracted many more "non-traditional" candidates when word spread you could make it on merit.
Blind auditions were scrapped when he left, and so did actual diversity. You can include everyone today in a single introduction by mentioning Yale, Juilliard, Paris Conservatory, Royal Academy, etc.
Merit destroys class privilege, which is a big faux pas when your patrons tend to be family of people who want to advance their careers in your institution. Just recently, I couldn't help but notice the timing of the creation of another superfluous position being filled by a fledgling choral director and a $MM donation by his parents to expand the performance hall he'll be using.
Mere dutiful patronage, surely, in these times of austerity.
I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and suggested blind tests for tech recruiting.
i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to subconsciously discriminate and pass their resume to the hiring team. Not perfect, but it gives X at least a better shot.
I was pretty much told it would never work and there were better ways and dismissed with a wave of a hand.
So why don't we do these somewhat blind tests?
Just look up "meritocracy dead" on a search engine of your choice. It's pretty minds boggling what people want to replace the goal of meritocracy with these days.
it is certainly still possible for lower class children to get a leg up, but it's still an uphill climb
In that light, the non diverse office might be seen as less productive. Maybe this is a bunch of pals goofing off, rather than people hired to do work?
But the whole point of the diversity hire isn't that you get someone who isn't white and that's it. The idea is that for every job, there are thousands of people who are qualified to do it, and among those, there are certainly people from all sorts of walks of life, and you'd spend earnest effort overcoming your subconscious biases by dipping your hand into the pool of equally skilled candidates, and pulling out the one that this overtly white dominated society we live in has held down since forever.
How did you find a recruiting pipeline where you can confidently say that there are thousands of equally competent potential hires in it? In Software Engineering?
I'm very curious to know where and how you source talent.
It makes sense if you want to increase diversity to have the beginning of the funnel get lots of diverse candidates in. The recruiter is not a decision maker in most places, so the hiring bar is not necessarily affected by whether the recruiter got more diversity candidates into the funnel or not.
As an example, in my experience there were not a lot of female candidate resumes coming in via normal channels. If the recruiter wants a bonus for increasing gender diversity, they are doing extra work to go and find female candidates and convincing them to apply. That is probably exactly what you want to be happening.
Unfortunately when you have affirmative action or hiring quotas, you inadvertently to create a culture where the diverse individuals are seen as less skilled and less qualified even when many of them would have gotten to the same place without the quotas.
That's not affirmative action. That's like giving free SAT prep to disadvantaged minorities. Affirmative action is further down the line, moving the bar for test/interview results to hit targets.
Which is not to say Google doesn't do it, just that the programs you're describing aren't it.
Been there, done that. It’s a no go.
Wow this is not at all correct based on my experience.
It is so common for "non-diverse individuals" to have gotten where they are based on things like network that I really don't think you can tell just by looking at someone.
The worst developers I have worked with are often traditional "non-diverse" candidates.
That's generally in proportion to the ratios in the workspace itself, nothing surprising statistically.
Now ask yourself who are best developers you have ever worked with. Even that is probably non-diverse ones.
That's a real question, and I don't have a good answer.
That apprenticeship is expensive. It takes a lot of handholding. Not because they're not smart, but just because there's a vast amount of information that's hard to write down. It's a million little factoids, and they're easy to Google ... once you already know that they're there.
It's not impossible to build a company with one really good senior dev and a bunch of fresh-outs. But that's made one level more complicated when you've got a diversity of cultures in the room, and the hiring process ends up coming down to "Well, that guy just seemed like a better fit". So the excluded ones give up, and the process perpetuates.
I'm oversimplifying like crazy, and every real situation is different. But startups don't have the money or time to do better, and established companies just keep repeating their situations because that's what got them there.
Some day somebody may figure out how to change that... and they're almost certainly going to get run through the wringer on HN accusing them of being affirmative-action SJW wokeness virtue-signallers. Which just makes it one step harder, and when they fail (as most new things do) it will further cement for people that Those People just can't code.
[for the people downvoting: I'm just pointing out what the article says.]
That doesn't seem a likely course of action.
The lawsuit would be hilarious.
Why don’t you ever suspect that young white guy to just have the job bececause their father knows the CXO from golf? Did that sysadmin use to room with the tech lead in colleges? Empirically, such employment biographies are far more common than your hypotheticals. Gut somehow, they do not seem to provoke this righteous anger of meritocracy.
By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.
Unless you're in a small company with a substantial ownership stake, not only should you accept the reality of this but also accept that dealing with it is part of your job. Making the best of the team and resources available is part of the job description.
If given the reins of the hiring process, a given developer could not do a better job filling out company's a roster.
The company has made decisions. Unless you were consulted on those decisions, your opinions aren't desired. Most of the time, your helping of those decisions' consequences will be inline with your responsibility for them: nil (scapegoating happens and shit rolls downhill, but I'd argue both are necessarily rare).
“I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn.”
was most likely speaking to her youth than her femininity.
Source: Myself as someone who has given advice to a lot of different interns/new grads along the same exact lines.
Some of the best and worst co-workers I've had in my relatively short career have been women. In my experience, women are much more sociable than men and bring a certain positive energy to a team, but are less competitive with the other men on the team. Men will always compete AGAINST other men FOR women. They want to be the alpha, which fundamentally means that they get the most women.
This means that women won't bother to compete with men and vice versa. Hiring a woman to work on a team of all men is probably exactly like hiring a man on a team of all women. It will bring undue, subversive, and potentially aggressive behavior between team members of the opposite sex because of the fundamentally sexual, subconscious forces we are subject to as human beings.
For instance, "are you supposed to be here?" may be a perfectly reasonable question asked purely because the asker doesn't recognize the person, and they would have asked it regardless of skin color, gender, etc. However, if you've heard things like that all your life, if your lived experience is that the majority don't expect someone of your gender or skin color to be in the exclusive areas they frequent, it can't help but hurt, and feel exclusive based on your gender, skin color, etc. You can't help but wonder "would they have asked that of me if I was a white man?", etc.
This doesn't mean the question asker meant anything by the question, but it does indicate a lack of sensitivity to the lived experience of the person here. You can compensate for it by learning about and recognizing that lived experience and reformulating the question; for instance "Hi! I don't think we've met; what do you do here?" for my example, or "Welcome aboard! I'm really excited to see what you accomplish here. My goal is to make sure this is a really positive experience for you, and my hope is that you'll be able to learn a lot while you're with us" for the original.
Sure, you can look at statistics and say that sexism exists, and that's all very important, but that doesn't really say all that much about individual social interactions, just like statistics about crime rates of ethnic group X doesn't really say anything about individual who belongs to ethnic group X.
A few years ago I tried to help someone on Stack Overflow who asked a series of very basic Python questions about the same piece of very basic code by pointing out that they're probably better off getting a Python book and actually learning the language first, as Stack Overflow is not really a mentoring platform. It was phrased fairly encouragingly (I thought anyway) and was intended just to help them in their struggle to get started with Python, but the person didn't take it very well and accused me of racism :-/
Perhaps the “everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn” comment was especially patronizing towards her purely based on the fact that she was a women, or perhaps it wasn't. It's almost impossible to say for sure, especially not based on this one sentence devoid of any context. In my Stack Overflow example I know there wasn't any racism involved because I didn't even notice the person was Indian until after he made that comment, yet the person was still left with a feeling of a racist interaction. It was a shitty situation for everyone involved.
This is true. There is scientific evidence that shows men prefer things, women prefer people. This is not to say women can’t succeed in tech or are not as good at tech, but the fact that women choose other fields belies this nature.
Women are better at language, social interactions, etc. So when her boss says to use her “feminine” skills to talk to a difficult co-worker, it’s simply a comment on a predisposed advantage women have over men when looking at the statistics.
Surprisingly, this would probably make females better managers rather than code monkeys. Managers make more money too.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/
> the times I was over-explained, or the times interviewers made a “not bad” facial expression when I replied correctly to technical questions
The problem women have today is that they are programmed to see everything as sexism, when in fact such things happen regardless of sex.
This really approaches disbelief. A “not bad” facial expression being sexism.
When she was fired for lacking team chemistry, I don’t doubt it when you have someone psycho-analyzing every single gesture and seeing it through some sexism lens.
And a junior developer out of college complaining about being “over-explained”. How hard is it to say “I am very familiar with this topic” and move on.
Case in point why women feel uncomfortable in the tech industry. Men holding opinions like this lurk there.
> > Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature
>
> This is true. There is scientific evidence that shows men
> prefer things, women prefer people. This is not to say
> women can’t succeed in tech or are not as good at tech,
> but the fact that women choose other fields belies this
> nature.
Even if most women prefer to work with people as opposed to working on things, it does not tell you anything about the specific candidate one is considering for a job.
Regarding the quote from the article: It was used to dismiss the idea of also going to high schools instead of just going to colleges to promote the companies opportunities. So while going into high schools to promote job opportunities in tech likely can not eliminate that general difference in interests, it can have an effect on those women who would be interested but are not convinced or aware (enough) yet.
This boss was clearly an amateur. A truly effective manager inputs their employees' eye colors, clothing preferences, heart rates, favorite books, and heights into the magic statistics machine to determine the correct person for each task.
But, what tech companies can do is change their candidate sourcing practices. I'm in favor of some version of the Rooney Rule [0] in tech hiring. Roughly, you should make sure to interview at least one person from an underrepresented group each time there's a position to fill. Given the pipeline problem, I'd cap it at some arbitrary number of candidates per opening -- one large enough to ensure that the company made an effort to seek out candidates who would add diversity to the company, but small enough that you can still actually hire. You'd have to validate that recruiters were actually contacting people from underrepresented groups to make sure you're not just getting to a point where every position ended with "Welp, we tried, but the only people we could find to interview for the position were these N white and Asian guys," but it could certainly work.
The beauty of this approach is that you don't lower your hiring bar. You just make sure to get people from underrepresented groups in front of your interviewers and hire them if they're the most qualified people for the job.
Now, I get that big companies don't hire for 1 position at a time, so, the point here would be to have your pool of candidates interviewing always contain a certain number of people from underrepresented groups. This is explicitly not a hiring quota, because you don't lower your bar. It's just putting an opportunity in front of more people to see if you can get people who look different from your standard straight, cisgender, white or Asian male tech worker into your recruiting pipeline to begin with.
---
It was a really interesting conversation because to get a diversity of outcomes they had to completely change their approach, not just sprinkle some diversity into their existing process.
Applied to the rooney rule from above it would involve cultivating multiple inputs to the talent pipeline to make sure interesting candidates don't get blocked along the way. NFL positions like head coach have a pretty limited pool of candidates to begin with, so ensuring an interview quota is likely sufficient. For something like software developer the pool is so much deeper and wider and interview quota on its own is unlikely to be sufficient.
Nobody ever doubted that there were 'good female writers' but there are 1000 writers for every 1 job, it's a hugely asymettrical situation.
The reason it's completely illegal and morally questionable to hire that way is because it ignores the material character of the individual in question.
If there are 10x more guys running the gauntlet of early-phase writing career, then it's really unfair and they are not getting the best writers (staff composition advantages notwithstanding).
A better approach wold have been to work with the agencies to get a true sense of the pipeline, and then to encourage and demonstrate the job is 'real' for more young women to understand that it's something they can aspire to.
The possibly sexist/racist actions of these companies are probably only going to get us into more culture wars, I'm not sure if they are a 'temporary pain' issue.
Edit: if you listen to 'Inside Conan OBrien' podcast by the head writers you'll get insight into several very inside conversations about the gender issue. In the 2000's there were hardly any female writers. Writing is a buddy-buddy system that's going to lean a certain way, so expressedly looking outside the boundaries of the pipeline is reasonable. Also a lot of the female writers in the 2000's indicated they literally 'did not know it was a job' in their youth. To be fair - almost nobody did. Though I'm not in the biz, as a young man I literally never contemplated the concept, I don't know anyone that even thought about it, it was like a thing that happened in a far off land. It's a hyper-niche kind of job with specific dynamics.
Tech companies are diverse, more so than most companies.
You mean to say 'not the right kind of diverse'.
The ridiculous, Monty Python conversation that nobody wants to have, is that since White Americans are slightly underrepresented, but Asian Americans are about 600% over-represented ... which means getting the 'right' kind of diversity literally means hiring less people of colour, specifically Asians, which seems really unfair to them for very obvious reasons.
It's funny and Orwellian at the same time that the problem exists out in the open, but nobody dare speak a word of it. These are the kinds of problems that Cults and the Bad Kinds of religions have.
The problem with the 'rule' as you describe it is it may decrease diversity in any sense.
There is no data to support the fact that African Americans and Latino Americans are showing up in the pipelines in sufficient the right qualifications to 'balance out' diversity.
The data actually works the other way - the ethnic and gender composition of people hired basically is a good reflection of the pipeline.
I understand we can do better than just looking at the pipeline, but from any specific, direct hiring perspective, the pipeline is it.
Within the pragmatic but admittedly narrow confines of 'the pipeline' - any company is going to be hard pressed to hire considerably more of the 'right race' of people. It's not going to matter that much how you do interviews.
'The Solution' is going to have to be 1) getting more kids from different backgrounds interested in tech at an early age and into the pipeline and 2) accepting that 'diversity' is an ideology on some level, and that just because you have people of some group, doesn't necessarily imply negative or racist behaviours. Nobody will ever state the later in public, but it's possible we come to terms with it.
Maybe I am missing something but I don’t see complaints about diversity in Arabia, Persia, African Regions, Asian regions.
Yet there are historic multi-ethnic conflicts in most of not all of these areas.
Take the Hausa, Fula, Igbo, and Yoruba of Nigeria for example, as an example.
Ultimately, dividing people and calling it “diversity” resembles a divide and conquer tactic for reducing the cohesion of a society, making it easier to control (via narratives and reducing my inter-group trust compared to some central, approved authority), in my view.
Check out Ryan Long for a humorous example: “When Racists and Woke Agree On Everything”:
I definitely agree that it's weird how much we focus on holding tech companies "accountable" for diversity when they're fundamentally working with whatever pipeline society gives them.
If you attempt to extend it to ethnicity (which this post is not about), this gets all really arbitrary, which is where your point comes in.
The cause of underlying skews is then a different discussion altogether.
1. You'll lose candidates to companies that close faster. In fact, you'll likely lose the best candidates.
2. Can be gamed by hiring managers. If they want to close a rec fast, they just find an unqualified member of an underrepresented group to interview to hit the Rule. Waste of time for everyone.
3. Demographic targeting (especially beyond gender) has a variety of issues (arbitrary definitions, unknowns about whether candidates are in what demographic, etc.).
You don't lower the bar but you do put a locking mechanism on your recruiting pipeline that reduces your hiring throughout in an already supply constrained environment and you impose greater hiring costs to make sure you always have a candidate.
Now that may still be a profitable thing to do, but you can pretend there are no costs and downsides. What you need to do it look at all the pros and cons and balance those considerations to find out what is most profitable. Anything that isn't profit maximizing over the time scale we are optimizing for is also to the detriment of the company.
(For reference, only about 25 percent of NFL players are white.)
"We want to hire you because you'll add diversity."
vs.
"I don't want to be hired just because I'll add diversity."
Since the solution of giving preference based on diverse attributes creates a deadlock, the problem has been framed wrong.
I'm not going to posit the right framing... I'm actually not sure. But letting people know they are doing the job for reasons other than their capability means they'll forever feel less qualified than their colleagues.
If a company wants to hire someone because of diversity, it’s not necessarily just because of diversity.
In the article, the author describes their experience as having been different than non-diverse candidates, therefore creating a sense of personal doubt about their abilities, however unfounded.
If given two equally qualified candidates, giving a preference to diverse ones does not present any deadlock. If you’re not just hiring someone for diversity, then you are doing that due diligence. Additionally, I would hope also doing the due diligence to make the environment you are hiring them into welcoming as well. The authors stories reflect things breaking down in this regard in a big way as well.
The fact that you got the same competence test should be enough. Leave it at "the team thinks you can do the job."
One source: With engineering it can be followed back to opportunity at school. The US school funding model sucks: wealthy districts get the most money, which means better education, which means students come out primed for better jobs. Then there's the Gatekeeping common in engineering that tries to keep out others (in the late 80's it was harassing women so that they dropped out... one of the frats at my uni had an actual game to try to get women to drop out by making fun of them in recitation, which was horrific).
A firing that comes as a complete surprise to the employee is generally a sign of a bad manager (not always, but true enough to be a useful heuristic).
It's a selfish, rational dick move, but most are. People rarely do dick moves that don't benefit themselves.
If the reason was: "You're a woman" then they should've been sued.
I'll be honest again: Yes, I'm a white male, but I'm considering hiring people for the first time and this sort of thing TERRIFIES me because I genuinely want to help out whoever I can, and I'm even a natural fan of "underdogs"... What would I do if my nonwhite, nonmale (or both) hire just isn't working out (for valid reasons) but I can't yet afford to fight a discrimination lawsuit? Let's say my imperfect solution to this was simply to just keep hiring other white males for a while. Eventually I realize I NEED more diversity, but now I've created the perfect conditions for discrimination lawsuits by having an all-white, all-male company... Do you see yet what the problem is, here?
Below, I do some napkin math to attempt to estimate your likelihood of getting in trouble for firing somebody.
In 20 years, there were 1.8M employee discrimination cases filed in the US, so ~roughly 90K per year. Each year, about 19M employees are fired or laid off.
Considering that not all employee discrimination suits arise from termination, we can expect a rate to be significantly below the calculated likelihood of 0.04% (90K/19M), or less than 1 in 200. However, I don't have an estimate for this,
You can adjust that for the prevalence of underrepresented groups in your field, of course - usually it will be about half that have some protected factor (age, gender, ethnicity, disability, etc.), so let's double that, for 1 in 100.
Of those cases, 82% were closed without even a settlement. So we're back down to about 1 in 500, if you pretend that the EEOC chooses entirely randomly and cannot differentiate between real discrimination and made up ones.
I think it would be worthwhile for you to do some real risk assessment, and figure out whether the < 1/500 chance of paying some money, if you need to fire a person with a protected attribute, is worth being "terrified" about.
(Also, age discrimination constitutes the plurality of EEOC cases, so you should possibly be more concerned about hiring people over the age of 35 than hiring women or black people).
Conversely, if you do have a legitimate issue, it's (a) usually something you couch the employee on before firing them and (b) means you can give a vague reason like "performance" and thus avoid paying out unemployment.
The employee herself can also reasonably observe the social environment - it's not as common these days, but there's still plenty of places that have the Asshole Rockstar who is never going to get fired. It's a bit suspicious when places like that suddenly trot out "culture fit" for the first time, as an excuse to fire a woman.
(I'd also say that as long as you don't do anything stupid like TELL people you're discriminating, it's remarkably hard to prove discrimination - legally you're pretty safe there. The other reply does a good job breaking out the math)
> Yes, I'm a white male, but I'm considering hiring people for the first time and this sort of thing TERRIFIES me because I genuinely want to help out whoever I can
You're not "helping out" by hiring a women, or a person of color. This mindset has set you up for failure before even starting.
> What would I do if my nonwhite, nonmale (or both) hire just isn't working out (for valid reasons) but I can't yet afford to fight a discrimination lawsuit?
If there's a valid reason, then there won't be a discriminiation lawsuit.
> Eventually I realize I NEED more diversity
"Eventually" is too late. Hire a diverse team from day 1. This comment suggests that "diversity", however you define it, is sub-optimal and a burden to be carried.
> but now I've created the perfect conditions for discrimination lawsuits by having an all-white, all-male company
This is a problem of your own making by not making the effort to hire a more diverse team from day 1. The additional potential legal costs are a cost associated with this approach.
Edit: "hourglass-figure adorer" in your HN bio is a bit of a concern. Does this have a meaning I'm not aware of, or is part of your public, profesisonal persona the enjoyment of a particular female body shape?
I don't think the hiring all white guys scenario as a workaround as you described is very realistic. If people are actually doing that, they're missing out on the full talent pool certainly.
So IIUC, the legal system carries some of the blame here.
If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4.
I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996 people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a ton of you out there and I can only hire so many so I am going to hire the very few who I am very certain will do a good job for the specific requirements my company has right now, even if it does something means I end up rejecting even better qualified candidates who I am uncertain about. Every hire costs me on the order of 50k per person in straight up recruiting costs, ramp up time to get that member to be productive, time lost doing interviews and filtering 1000s of people.
Hiring and firing people is basically the option of last resort because of how risky, expensive, and time consuming it is.
Finally it's highly unlikely that anything I say will be of much help to you anyways.
Point 3 is such a stupid thing to say. I don't know about reporting him for it, how about just telling him that he is stupid and condescending? That would work in Sweden at least, maybe there is a different work culture in USA.
Point 4 is actually true, proved scienctifically, and has nothing to do with discrimination. Due to differences in the brain that we are born with, men are on average more interested in technology than women. That does not mean that you can point to a specific women and draw the conclusion that because she is a women she is less suited to work in tech than a man. It does however explain why more men than female study computer science for example. Yes, I'm sure phenomens like computer games biased towards male might enhance this, but even without it you would see the differences.
Before you downvote me because I'm a sexist, please have a look here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-mens-brains-a...
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-...
> “Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature, and there is nothing we can do. I see it in my children: While my son prefers video games, my daughter only cares about Facebook.”
We can see that adult women and men make different choices. We can go back in time and see they made different choices as teenagers and young adult when on average they chose to study different things. In the example above, her children make different choices as children.
A counter argument might be that different toys are targeted at girls and boys. It sounds like a possible explanation, but could it be that the reason different toys are targeted at girls and boys is because of different preferences? If there is demand, someone will deliver the supply.
If we take another step back in time and look at infants, we get the answer. Show newly born infants things and faces and the boys are more interested in the things and the girls are more interested in the faces (people).
So yes, there is an average difference in interest - not a difference in intelligence or ability, but in interest.
There is also plenty of overlap. Many women and men are interested in the same things. Some women are very interested in technology. Some men are very interested in people. But on average, there is a significant difference.
Is this a problem?
Only if we consider the typical male preference for technology to be better or superior than the typical female preference for people. This is where the real problem lies.
Men and women are, on average, different. Let's appreciate our differences.
It's a problem if one applies the typical to the specific. If a woman is sitting in front of you and you assume her characteristics match the mean of all women's characteristics, congrats, you are sexist.
This is difficult to do without unfairly discounting the cases where people with talent still encounter unfair discrimination ...but this isn't it.
There are plenty of female developers / engineers who have their colleagues' respect. They would also never find out they are diversity hires.
If you are simply bad at your job, but also [protected status here], it's suddenly somehow newsworthy - I never liked this part of our culture.
They are in avg more social.
But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman because " what happens when she gets pregnant" and we did hire her because she was good and I stood up for her.
I should not need do so this!
I think we would be better if with have more woman in our teams.
This is perhaps an example where extending parental leave benefits to both parents solves both ends of the problem. Men also may leave if they choose to expand their family, and women aren't pressured into more child care than they prefer due to the men not having parental leave to help.
> They are in avg more social
Careful with these generalizations. Women get placed in impossible behavioral expectations. Told to be more assertive, but then perceived differently than men when they are.
The one woman I worked with that didn’t end up so well was an engineer, who when she decided she wanted to move on with her career developed a standard playbook of falsely claiming sexual harassment against an executive and walk away with a nice check in hand. Done to every employers she’s ever worked with including a few FAANGs.
On a more related note about this article, I got lost on the cultural termination. I didn’t hear discrimination. I heard bad hiring practice, probably by people who don’t have a lot experience hiring. If they were smart after that term they updated their hiring practices. That’s why some startups invite you to lunch or an outing.. to avoid those issues.
As a new founder having accusations like this terrify me of hiring in general. It’s different when it’s yours and not just a cog in a machine
The soft bigotry of low expectations and affirmative action rears its ugly head yet again.
Hire people of all races, genders and creeds based on _merit_, not diversity quotas. No one should have to show up to work feeling like a second class citizen and that they're only there because of their sex or the color of their skin.
For example, looking for only people who graduated from a certain tier of school limits you by adopting whatever discriminatory practices that those schools have adopted. Or looking for people with a particular experience that is rarely afforded to a particular class of people.
Instead, by working identify the merits that actually result in high performance and then working to evaluate those in an interview can get you better and more diverse employees.
A female coworker shared a disagreeable opinion, which the author takes it as a personal attack, bottles up their response, deems the co-worker a sexist, and judges their parenting skills to boot.
Ironically, they then go on to call the event they were attending a wasted educational opportunity.
Downside of being a token X: normally they just keep you around long enough to tick off the "hiring" box(es), since nobody gives a shit about retention, and you probably won't be the one chosen to get put on a pedestal.
So yeah, keep trying until you can find a place where you can just do your work and be taken seriously and not have them treat you like a piece of meat or worse. Good luck. I'm still looking for that place.
I work at a smallish company owned by a bigger group of companies, it is a nice place to work and family friendly, but not at the top of many people's list of exciting places to work.
I don't know all the filters between me and the people submitting their resumes, but there are lots of stages and filters and the process is slow.
As an unexciting company we're not getting the first draft picks from the market. By the time we get internal approval to offer a job to someone, more often than not men have another better offer, women generally don't.
I believe we are able to hire women with skills and experience that would not be as available to us if they were men.
Part of the dynamic would be that our company is very family friendly, and on average women are prioritising that higher than men, and thus on average ranking us higher than men, and therefore some of the bias is structural, rather than being entirely driven by personal misogyny of the recruiters and interviewers.
But that would only help explain the higher availability of excellent female candidates who are prioritising raising a family, it doesn't explain my belief that we have disproportionally been able to hire women with standout level of skills and experience no intention of ever having children*, candidates that I believe would be much less likely to be available to us if they were men.
(* no - I didn't ask that in the interview, I learned that afterwards, when we were work colleagues! )
What sparks my curiosity, though, is out of 3 companies the original poster has written about, the second time she knew she is a diversity hire. Yet, this time it doesn't matter at all, because she was excited about the opportunity.
It strikes me, because it suddenly wasn't a problem once it aligned with the original poster. If we stand up to some idea, shouldn't we live up to it every time? If you hate being a diversity hire, why would you accept it once it suits you?
> I didn’t know what to think. I have a strong opinion about diversity hires: Although I don’t think they are a perfect solution, I consider them an effective measure to break the ceiling glass that excludes minorities from certain roles. But I always thought that if it ever happened to me, it would be a transparent process and I would have the opportunity to accept the conditions deliberately.
It was at least implied upfront that she was a diversity hire for 2.
And maybe I just don't have as strong a moral compass as you, but I have found it difficult to always uphold the ideas I stand for. E.g. I like the idea of solely merit-based hiring. But if I got a dream job because I knew the CEO's friend and they put in a good word for me, I would have a hard time rejecting that offer.
It only works if you're PoC, sweaty.
Homogeneous cultures are bad at understanding how they seem to outsiders. We all lose the trees in the forest. It's not exclusive to race or gender but it comes it in particular around identities (gender, inexperience, etc) that someone has. It's really easy to say a series of statements that an insider would recognize as referencing one quality (i.e. inexperience) but an outsider could easily mistake for referencing another quality (i.e. gender). In order to learn what insiders mean, you need to be in a space where you can hear what existing insiders mean, which generally means insiders should take care with their language.
This is one of the reasons I get suspicious any time "cultural fit" is brought up. It's often talked about as if the existing team has a 'good' culture, and new people might disrupt this existing good culture. However, whenever we discover a cultural mismatch between a new colleague and the existing norm, I suspect what is revealed is that the existing 'good' culture is hostile to certain other cultures. Sometimes that's a good thing (coders should be hostile to people who don't think typos should matter), but generally you want to avoid it.
To put it another way: people from new backgrounds let you see your organization from a different angle. It's a rare and valuable service. If folks are going around and saying things that are earnestly meant to be supportive, but are being heard as diminutive or reductive, that's valuable data! You can learn to not do that! Take the feelings of outsiders who you would like to be insiders seriously - as primary source data - in order to grow your org beyond what it is now.
1 & 3: the internship mentor is honest even when saying "interns have to learn". This is not discrimination. The fact UI dev interns do not pass a test versus data science interns is not that shocking. In 3 he tries to solve his problems with the help of the intern. That's quite unfair. At the minimum he should have obtained the intern's agreement beforehand, whether a man or woman.
2: a company of assholes
4: I guess companies should not single out women once they are on payroll. That's not helping them.
Why would anyone think that? The point of diversity hiring is to do deliberately what we should be doing naturally until we don't have to do it deliberately anymore. I would be flatly amazed if being told you are a diversity hire is common in any industry. Can you even imagine if a college recruiter said to a prospective student "You're only being accepted because you're Native American, do you still want to attend here?"
I want to make constructive criticisms (which is extremely difficult in the context of someone perceiving harm), but I'd prefer not to get downvoted, so I will try to be as empathetic as possible when stating the following.
> I have a strong opinion about diversity hires: Although I don’t think they are a perfect solution, I consider them an effective measure to break the ceiling glass that excludes minorities from certain roles.
> Was I only selected because I was the only female applicant? Would I have passed the technical assessment? Would I keep moving up the company hierarchy only because I had a minority pass? Did they think that I wouldn’t mind knowing my own recruitment criteria?
These things are exactly why some people are against this way of increasing diversity. Critics of forced diversity hiring see this as a direct and obvious (at least to them) consequence of this practice; her experiencing the result is rather unsurprising (her surprise, however, is). She also does not suggest a better solution, so this just seems like whining (the definition of which is "complaining about a situation without a known solution"). I'd suggest that she probably wasn't informed that she was a diversity hire because intuitively, people know this is a shameful practice without great consequences...
> I have never considered that “having chemistry with the team” could be a reason for being let go. Guess what? After a quick Google search about “cultural fitting in tech,” I discovered that is an argument often used by tech companies to disguise a discriminatory preference.
She links to an example of this, but the example is just another person pulling the racism card when the only example that person gave was not drinking after work with coworkers. You can't expect people to not see you as a diversity hire, but only when it is convenient for you... if you want them to not see you as one when hiring you, but if when letting go of you for some given reason, you want to jump to conclusions based on diversity... you're gonna need much better evidence than that. "Cultural fit" is unfortunately a very valid condition for hire, at least if the goal is productivity and happiness: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-wor... The fact that "lack of cultural fit" SEEMS TO sometimes fall along diversity lines, is not so much a problem with diversity hiring as it is a problem of people just hanging out too much with other people who seem more like them, something that is (unfortunately) a natural inclination and something that literally every one of us should be consciously fighting. But it's a subpar situation, for sure.
yes, some people have a problem working together. carl in the story is a good example. carl is someone i would let go because he is uncooperative. this again has nothing to do with cultural fit.
and especially if the difference in cultures falls along diversity lines, i would very carefully examine what the actual culture is and make a strong effort to push for a culture change.
I don't think this is realistic. Suppose I move to Texas and manage to start working for a company that likes to watch rodeos on weekends and listens to country music all day in the office. Meanwhile, I'm a techno guy who can't stand rodeos nor country music. I start to get irritated with the all-day-country thing, and (as it turns out) work sometimes gets discussed at these rodeos everyone else is going to that I'm missing, so I always end up a little behind where everyone's at regarding work stuff. The rest of the team starts to perceive this as me "not really caring" or whatever, and eventually I get fired due to "lack of fit".
I cannot claim veiled discrimination because I am a white male getting fired by other white males (and perhaps some females, but not 50%).
Do you really expect the entire company to conform to my taste in things? I took race and gender out of the picture here to try to show that this is unrealistic.
> carl is someone i would let go because he is uncooperative.
Honestly it's weird that he was even kept around. Sometimes, people who are willing to butt heads on something are good workers, though.
> if the difference in cultures falls along diversity lines, i would very carefully examine what the actual culture is and make a strong effort to push for a culture change.
I think the best time to do this is at the start, because I also think that after you get above, say, 20 people, the cultural trajectory has already been set and it becomes massively harder to change.
So the team should change to accept a racist, a rude asshole, an elitist narcissist, all the other toxic personality types.
In my experience "doesn't fit culture" is code for they're an asshat.
Culture in this context doesn't mean ethnic culture. It's referring to work culture, work ethics and personality at work.
Also thinking the world needs to change to fit you is the epitome of entitled snowflake attitude. A cultural misfit anyplace I have or would work.
> I have never considered that “having chemistry with the team” could be a reason for being let go.
When you're working in a startup with 5 people and you're not in sync with their personalities, it can be a major drag on everyone.
Having had to see people let go in startups for simply not fitting in, this has nothing to do with you being a woman and to frame it that way reduces the effectiveness of your overall narrative.
> I had never received any feedback indicating my performance was poor. In fact, it was exactly the other way around: I’ve never had a role that was such a good fit for my expertise before. So I asked if he could detail better where I failed. He refused to..
It is completely unprofessional to fire someone having never given any feedback. Startup or not.
And providing reasons after the fact, as others have stated, is a bad idea because it opens up liability. You have no discriminatory reasons whatsoever for letting someone go, but you bumble some words and the next thing you know you're getting sued. Better to treat it like you're talking to the cops and just not say anything.
I agree there should be better feedback. If they are annoying, have the decency to tell them why and point out a few things so they don't go from job to job wondering why they don't fit in.
That about sums up these accounts of "discrimination." "I got a job because I was a girl! Which I'm totally okay with, except that I didn't know I was getting a job because I'm a girl, and that makes it discrimination."
That's what worries me too.
I like to throw a racist jokes, especially about my own nation from time to time
and I guess I'd have hard time in corpos and companies like faang because polacks tend to lack of thick skin /s
It's the idea of punching down, vs punching up.
That is, if you are joking about someone in a worse position than you, it's punching down, and a dick move. If you are joking about someone in a better position than you, it's punching up, and allowable. It's why it's okay for black comedians to joke about white people, but not okay for white comedians to joke about black people. It's why politics is always fair game to make fun of (people in power), but disabilities, say, aren't. Etc.
While punching across is technically doable, it's also very, very hard to do, because ultimately who are you telling the joke to? Who is laughing? I.e., if you talk about things your family does from your own homeland, and people laugh, what are they laughing at? They're laughing at your homeland, your culture, because they feel 'above' it in some way. It's an invitation to punch down. Otherwise it isn't funny; it's interesting. Truly punching across tends to be for an audience that is also the butt of the joke (think Vir Das telling jokes about Hindu beliefs).
Now, that's not to be confused with an explanation or similar. I've worked for a German company, and when asking about why we did something that seemed suboptimal to me, another employee, himself German, has said "That's very German". That's not necessarily a judgement, that's not an invitation to laugh at how silly German culture is; that's just a prelude to an explanation that it's a cultural difference in priorities.
The set of things you can comfortably joke about at work is pretty small these days and almost never includes jokes about any kind of group identity.
Do we really have to explain why that's inappropriate?
I view this as a kind of self-criticism, awarness that your country ain't as perfect as the gov paints it and so on
I understand that it’s more complicated when you are making jokes about your own ethnic group. But please understand that it’s not an issue of “bad culture fit.” As an example, employees who make relentless personal criticisms of their coworkers aren’t gruff people that have trouble fitting in to an upright corporate culture: they are jerks whose behavior rightfully makes them difficult to work with and hard to justify hiring. It is the same with making ethnic / racist jokes in the office. Just don’t do it.
(There is also a difference between ethnic jokes about Poles and racist jokes about black people or Jews, but that’s a different discussion. Both are really not appropriate for the office.)
Oh wow, here we go with racism gatekeeping.
(Particularly interested in responses from often-marginalized individuals)
She complains that the company didn't tell her she was a diversity hire? Doing this seems like a recipe for any diversity hire to always have imposter syndrome.
There's definitely sexism in the tech industry but I'd argue the best way forward is with tact. Coming out guns blaring with accusations and always assuming bad intentions will just alienate people from the cause.
She'd be better served trying to understand where people are coming from and working through specific, addressable issues.
She is not doing that
> working through specific, addressable issues
She is doing exactly this
It's illegal to do and definitely illegal to put on paper (in the US) - it's discrimination. That said, depends on what "HR had intentions to prioritize candidates" means in context.
One has to keep in mind that not only do Other people offend us inadvertently but also WE inadvertently offend others too.
We can’t be so sensitive that we become prickly and then have people avoid you because you’re so prickly.
We have to be okay with not everything coming from your point of view. You won’t be able to have the Other persons PoV either even if you’re conscious of it. You have no idea what I’m thinking in a moment. It’s a fool’s errand.
Be genuine, be respectful, but don’t fault people for coming short when trying.
When talking to an audience you cannot simultaneously please everyone. It’s just not possible. At best you can be compliant with whatever the accepted practice is.
This stuff is why a lot of diversity recruiting makes no sense to me. There are lots of good arguments in favour of targeting under represented groups (social justice, discovering talented people who get missed with traditional methods, willing to accept lower wages, less likely to unionize, etc) but the idea that women or Black people are useful because they “think differently” just seems offensive.
They are. This is well studied in several countries now.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
Edit for the downvoting morons:
'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Read the fucking article.
> The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.
Boys are unquestionably more likely to take an interest in tech than girls, and no amount of 'equality' or active enticement aimed at girls has been able to shift that balance. The only thing left is to set diversity targets and discriminate the way that is described in TFA. And it's condescending and harmful as hell towards women who are actually good at what they do in these fields.
Convincing society that every workplace should have a 50/50 gender split is one of the most nefarious things large corporates have done. They've doubled the size of the workforce while not paying a cent more for it. Which is why it takes 2 people working full time today to have the same lifestyle as one person could have funded 50 years ago. Feminism was subverted into enabling corporate greed.
The messaging was quietly shifted from 'all women should have the ability to work if they choose to' to 'all women should work'.
Predisposition to do a thing is your inclination or desire to do a thing at all.
Basically the linked article finds that women are perfectly capable of doing the job, but the more choice they have, the less they want to do it.
Keep faith cause I've worked in different companies where everyone was really accepted and celebrated. Thank you for writing this article: hopefully, straight IT men will hear us and fight too.
The article is just as much for those who are trying to help women and minorities as it is for those who are biased.
- Being discriminated or insulted for being X
vs:
- Made fun or insulted with reference to X
Not getting a job, a promotion, or even simply heard by your colleagues because you're X is discrimination. Being treated worse because of X is discrimination. Being called anti-X slurs by people considering X being inferior is racism.
But being insulted or made fun of with reference to your X status might not be discrimination at all. Might just be an angry colleague or a colleague making a joke, and it might happen from each to every other member of the team.
E.g. if someone makes fun of an fellow British or German's or Texan's dev's accent, the team can just laught it off. Such jokes happen (or used to happen before fast-track-cancelling became a thing) all the time between young devs in teams.
But if the same is done with the same intent, but the person is e.g. Indian or Asian or Latino, many (especially outside the team or people new to one) make it all about racism and discrimination.
There's this idea that people must be 100% "professional", non joking, always zen-calm, all the time. That is, dry and passive aggresive.
The "let me explain discrimination to you" responses from white men in this thread is really cringe-inducing.
That said as a X (ethnicity), straight, cisgender, male, I can say I have been mocked in jest, insulted in anger, etc for all those things in the workplace, and did the same to others in rounds. Both in 100% uniform teams, and in mixed teams.
Welcome to the real world.
This idea is likely held by people who have not had a lifetime of discrimination and insults and made fun of for X. When you have been such a victim, being in a professional, zen-calm work environment is a luxury, and honestly not too much to ask for.
What's wrong with feminine approach?
People use this kind of wording especially when it comes to design
- e.g room, or outfit, generally those things that are considered as a areas where women are way better, so?
>That social networks can involve as much technology as any video game and that actually Facebook was one of the most influential tech companies of the last ten years?
How's that relevant?
People don't learn coding during Facebooking, unlike games where it's way more probable.
What if a manager advised to use “manly ruggedness” to fix an algorithm from O(n^2) to O(n)? It employ “Irish Luck”?
"you will use your whatever skill and you will be fine" is quite patronizing.
i would have stated the situation without making assumptions about her ability to do this, especially not any assumptions tied to her gender. i would have explained that she was the only person on the team who doesn't already have a bad relationship with carl. i would have asked her if she wants to do this and give her the option to decline. and maybe even offered a bonus for taking on a difficult task. and at the same time i would have pushed to have carl fired because he clearly isn't getting along with anyone else.
Do you mean that more people get into gaming because of modding?
I meant that some games tend to get people into programming