The big result there is this: "Poor performances in technical interviewing happen to most people, even people who are generally very strong. However, when we looked at our data, we discovered that after a poor performance, women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men."
On the hiring side, "For the specific case of an online job posting, on average, 1,000 individuals will see a job post, 200 will begin the application process, 100 will complete the application, 75 of those 100 resumes will be screened out by either the ATS or a recruiter, 25 resumes will be seen by the hiring manager, 4 to 6 will be invited for an interview, 1 to 3 of them will be invited back for final interview, 1 will be offered that job and 80 percent of those receiving an offer will accept it (Talent Function Group LLC)." This implies that 80% of interviews lead to rejection.
Given that level of rejection, the key here is to get women to know the odds and keep trying.
At the start of our teens, we lose the intrinsic value that society places on us as children. For many boys, after this, their only worth is in what they can accomplish, for themselves or for others. For many girls, they learn that they are intrinsically valuable as women, as long as they're attractive.
It's not an issue of 'explaining' the odds. It's an issue of women knowing that they're worth something in and of themselves, competing against men who are motivated by a lifetime of experience telling that if they can't achieve, they are nothing.
That is a pretty huge statistic, - what also pops out to me is: "stop practicing ". This seems to imply that these technical interviews are skills that you don't really gain on the job. I know that personally would 9 times out of 10 spend time on a cool / beneficial project rather than making time to practice trivia problems.
logically unexplainable multiple rejections just after very short interactions by seemingly picky capricious agents on the other side of the interactions - isn't it that the men have biologically wired in them as a normal thing to expect, doesn't matter be it dating or sales or tech interview...
Would this imply that women are also more likely to give up
if they get the job and they find that it's particularly challenging or competitive? If so, we'd expect higher churn out of the field, putting more downward pressure on diversity.
And this doesn't have to be just women, it could be anyone with a genetic or cultural predisposition (reducing diversity at least in personality types). Lot's of selection for monoculture here.
>Given that level of rejection, the key here is to get women to know the odds and keep trying.
Now that's an important fact that tends to get overlooked. Ninety-nine percent of the agitation about increasing "representation" tends to focus on accusing everyone of misogyny and attempting to destroy existing culture. But increasing the confidence level of female applicants, so they aren't put off by immediate rejection, could be a much less destructive way of achieving the goal.
That is some strange chain of reasoning. Do you really think men are more educated about these odds than women? Is there a secret male only class on this?
Maybe, just maybe, women don't want all of that, and we're collectively pushing them (in the name of equality of outcome) to something they don't care for? If you look at the stats, women in more egalitarian societies (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) are much less likely to choose IT over less egalitarian ones.
> women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men
For reference, what is this saying about how many of those that stop practicing are men?
7 times more likely than what? I haven't read the article yet. Any given individual is how likely to 'stop practicing' after a rejection? 10% if man, 70% if woman? 1% if man, 7% if woman?
teaching women to keep trying after failure should be done from an early age, i'm worried for women of the future that equality is causing men to learn the hard way along their whole career but for women they are going to be given easier routes to success but then fail in the real world because it's become hard all of a sudden.
> the key here is to get women to know the odds and keep trying
That's getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. The real key here is to fix the interviewing process, like the article said. Quit with the cargo-cult technical questions that don't mean anything, and just _talk_ to people.
Indians of Asian descent are a minority in the US, but well represented in Software Engineering. Further, there are plenty more Indian, Chinese, and Russian female engineers, than there are American (of european, aka White) female engineers.
I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.
> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.
And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE.
When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks.
Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy.
That's because Indian (particularly) men consider engineering to be a safe choice (source: am Indian). Anecdotally, speaking to women (esp American), they find engineering to be categorically unsafe from a career progress perspective. You may not 'see' the bias, but they definitely feel it. The effect is measurable.
I am no expert, maybe it has something to do with maternity leave regimes or the interviews (like OP mentions)?
I have the same conclusion. The pipeline problem cited in the article is real problem, imho all the diversity efforts have to be directed at schools and parents. This is were the decision is made for college. After that you can't do much. My team is mostly male, we'd be happy to hire female developer, I think being a female would actually help to pass interview. But the resumes we see are all male, with very rare exceptions.
My analogy for the situation are as with seeds, if you only planted "potatos" in spring, there's not much you can do in autumn to get more "tomatos". (hope this is not offensive analogy in anyway, English is not my native language)
Situation with lack of female developers is not US-specific. I went to college in Ukraine, of ~100 sudents on computer science faculty, less than 10 were woman.
The fact that there're more Russian/Indian woman I think is because they are from immigrant families where husband is a developer. I'm developer and I met my wife at work back in Ukraine. But if you look % of woman developers in Ukraine, it's the same as in US.
A lot of my friends taught their wifes to become QA\developers after they moved to US and wife's profession didn't transfer to US well. Imho, entering IT is not that hard even without prevous experience, you do need to put hours to learn/practice, but unlike many other professions you can do that by just sitting at home and spending couple hundreds on books/video courses.
Are you saying that cultural differences can't be explained by systemic biases? Systemic bias may be the cultural difference, and in this context appears redundant.
This addresses a straw man; nobody is saying that there is systemic bias against _all_ minorities, just some.
This in particular is the concept of a "model minority".
Culture difference cannot explain why women are not well represented in tech.
Culture difference can be a part of systemic bias, anyway. Let's say you have some programming job. The interviews focus on questions about frobbing linked lists (which is often the case). Now, it turns out that people from demographic A are more likely to focus on these questions when practicing for interviews, whereas demographic B focuses on honing the skill set they need for the actual job (algorithmy linked list stuff may not be necessary at all!).
You'd say that it's not possible for /culture/ to change how you study. There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills. This stems from the general culture of finding and using a formulaic method of succeeding at academics. I don't like this culture (it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic), and always have spoken out against it, but it's there.
But, you say, that's a different country, what about a minority demographic within the same country? Firstly, minorities more often than not are segregated into their own communities (socially, if not physically) due to various voluntary and involuntary reasons, and the effect can be the same as being in a different country (albeit milder).
Now realize that an interviewer will probably design questions around the kind that they are used to and that they (and their peers) would do well with. This is an unconscious bias -- interview questions are more often than not tests of how similar you are to the (often non-diverse) peer group of the interviewer, and not actually a test of how good you are as a candidate. This is an association fallacy, "all people like my peer group are good programmers, hence all good programmers are like my peer group". Of course, interviewing is often about avoiding bad programmers much more than it is about hiring good ones -- generally folks are okay with accidentally not hiring a good programmer, but want to avoid hiring a bad one at all costs. Thus tweaking your interview process to target a subset of the set of all good programmers isn't that bad, is it? Except that this targeting carries an unconscious bias inside it, and unfairly ends up disproportionately excluding minorities. If you're going to use a process prone to false negatives on purpose, be damn sure that the likelihood of someone being a false negative is in no way correlated with the demographic they are from. You may not have designed the process with this correlation in mind (hence, "unconscious bias"), but this bias is still there.
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And it doesn't have to be culture differences. You have a lot of other behavioral differences due to economic status or demographic which are unconsciously excluded in interviews. E.g. women are less likely to apply for jobs where they do not have all the listed qualifications, but men are very likely to apply, and get hired, because not all the qualifications were necessary anyway. The fix here is to be clear on what you absolutely need in a candidate, and what would be "nice to have".
And it doesn't have to be behavioral differences either. Sometimes it has to do with defining your inputs. Many companies focus on hiring from a set of people which itself is biased. It can be by hiring only from certain colleges (and then inexplicably whining about the "pipeline" -- you chose the pipeline!). It can be from having unconscious or conscious discrimination against autodidacts. Or code bootcamp folks. If you restrict your inputs to an already biased source, you will get biased results.
There are tons and tons of articles and papers out there about this. These aren't unknown effects. They're well established.
None of this is on purpose, of course (at least, I hope it isn't!). But it's still a bias, even if it's unconscious. And the onus is on the creators of the bias to fix it.
There are a million reasons out there why various demographics aren't well-represented in tech. It's just lazy to blame it on the demographics and say "it's cultural differences" without realizing the mistakes made by tech cos in making culture a factor in the first place.
why? why should you be more inclined to think the explanation is found in a pertinent cultural difference between two large groups of people, (asian women, non-asian women) rather than that the explanation is to be found in the culture of one, small group, (tech)? maybe you're right, but i don't understand the inclination.
> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.
This reveals a complete misunderstanding of how "systemic bias" occurs and persists.
[Edited with further thoughts]
"Cultural differences" don't just appear out of nowhere. Culture itself is an amalgamation of different human experiences that have combined and recombined over tens of thousands of years. It's not static. The things you deem "cultural differences" have many causes, and "differences" can and do change all the time.
When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation.
"Systemic bias" may or may not exist in this case, but if you think cultural differences themselves can't lead to systemic bias then you are mistaken.
"We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game.”
I understand that people here hate technical interviews, but are we going to skip over the fact that the whole premise of this article is that the technical interview is awful for everybody, but minorities are more affected, because their poor little brains can’t figure that out? It’s ridiculous that you’d ever even propose that some "VP of Diversity and Inclusion” has anything to do with hiring of engineers. Why is this garbage being given any thought on HN is baffling to me.
Someone gets it. Funny how people who are so "moral", actually end up being incredibly immoral and biased.
Here's a question: if there's such a demand for solutions that solve a problem that the "majority" can't see, why don't women and minorities just start their own companies to solve those problems and make piles of $$$?
Reality check: building a good team is a struggle for every race, culture, gender, and individual in every industry on the planet. I get it though, it's a lot easier to mooch off of actual engineers who build solutions and then act like they had some significant impact as the "Director of Diversity".
Keep riding those coat-tails, maybe one day you will invent something on your own that isn't pseudo-scientific bullshit and actually improves people's lives. Go on, I DARE you to run your own startup and actually try to hire good help. You'll quickly find you have no time for such nonsense and only care about getting $*!@& done.
This is because the technical interview has completely degenerated into an arms race. It started with good intentions. It used to be just, here's a problem, try to solve it and let's discuss. And at first it was fine. But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to "show off" and impress the interviewer. So everyone started to focus on those to impress the interviewer. Then the interviewers noticed and started to state they would only be impressed by more and more obscure algorithms and data structures.
And then the real downward spiral began with the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview. More books were published, a whole industry to support this. Then came the sites like leetcode and HackerRank. Now there's a lot of money supporting and pushing for continuing this stupid process. And the arms race just keeps getting worse and worse. The interviewers expect more and more obscure algorithms and data structures and justify it with "must avoid false positives". This just increases the study time for candidates and they're willing to spend time and money to do it. And the tech interview industry (all the books and sites) are happy to push this arms race since it's more money for them. Now they have enough money to go openly defend the tech interview as the "best practice".
It's not even enough to get the right answer now. You have to do it fast enough or you fail. And now they care about syntax on a whiteboard. None of this used to be true. It all started as a way to see how you approach a problem and discussing it. No expectations that you would correctly get Algorithm ABC and Data Structure XYZ. No expectation that the syntax is correct, pseudo code was ok. No expectation even on a complete working solution, the point was just to see if you can reason about the problem.
All that is gone, replaced by the tech interview arms race. Now it's just a massive speed pattern matching contest to see if you've studied enough to hopefully cover the obscure problem the interviewer will pick and if you can correctly pattern match in time based on the hundreds of questions you did on leetcode. Completely useless and against the original intent of tech interviews.
Technical interviews are moving in the direction of more concreteness
Herein lies the scam. (Disclaimer: It's not on purpose, they're lying to themselves too)
Just because you have a process to produce a "concrete" result, that doesn't mean it doesn't stand on a house of cards.
I'd have to sit and have a think to make a clearer explanation than by analogy, so here's an analogy. This reminds me of the way people with an insufficient anti-authoritarian streak are more willing to question a person's on the spot decision than a decision from systematic, bureaucracy or law.
Just because more time and process has gone into establishing them, doesn't necessitate that the decisions are any better founded than what some rando pulls out of their ass.
Because, at the end of the day, taking the technical portion of the interview itself too seriously is the real fraud. There is exactly one way to tell how well someone will be able to contribute to our team, with our technologies, in our environment after a few weeks of getting up to speed. And that's to hire them.
The technical portion of the interview isn't useful beyond a low-bar rule-out criteria. After that, the technical portion turns back towards the softer skills of how the interviewee handles hitting a wall at problem solving in a field where nobody knows everything.
The current environment in tech is as follow: Someone goes through an interview process. Depending on the result, they get brought in or not. If they are brought in, they accept an offer. Usually it will contain some kind of language about blah blah trial period 3 months blah blah, sometimes in precise terminology, sometimes vaguely.
If someone is absolutely useless right off the bat, immediately everyone's like "but but we need to coach them, they just started, they'll get better". If after 3 months they're still useless, then it's "Blah blah it's the company's responsibility to keep them around and coach them because we hired them and we failed at interview".
That can only happen so many times (and can ruin teams or entire companies) before you start getting downright paranoid when interviewing. Maybe you have a lot of false positive and false negative, but if your interview process is Google-like enough, on average you'll turn out okay-ish (source: Google/Facebook/Netflix/whatever other company with such an interview process. They have some pretty strong teams in there). But since it's so hard to get rid of a bad apple, you can't take risks (Im being told Netflix is good at getting rid of people).
Change the game a bit: make it easy to get rid of bad apples early on. You know the interview process is bad anyway. Give people a chance. If they're actually competent, they have nothing to worry about. They'll get hired, prove their worth, and stick around. If they're bad, well, bye bye. Then we no longer have to rely on excruciatingly stupid interview processes.
A lot of people think this is inhumane/heartless. That big evil corporations MUST provide people with jobs and must keep them no matter how bad they are because they have bills to pay. I say its heartless to not give people a chance to prove themselves (or to fail while at least trying).
Notice that according to the very figures cited by the article and released by Google and Facebook, as well as other uncited figures released by Yahoo, Amazon, and LinkedIn, whites are actually underrepresented with respect to the general population of white Americans, not overrepresented, and minorities collectively are therefore actually overrepresented, not underrepresented. This is primarily due to Asians being so overrepresented with respect to the general population of Asian Americans, by as much as a factor of ten.
Yet amazingly, the charges that tech "lacks diversity," is "too white," or even "overwhelmingly white"[1][2][3] haven't let up even as the hard data refuting them has become available, and may even have intensified. In fact, many of these critics, like the author of the linked article, actually attempt to use the very data that refutes their point to somehow support it--an indication, perhaps, of the "post-fact" era leftists so often complain we're now living in.
Little wonder is it then that Trump's white supporters despise journalists so much, considering how deeply so many journalists seem to despise white Americans.
I agree that tech interviews are terrible, and you cannot do any sort of self-reflection on them (especially if they are these q/a and or puzzle types where they don't give you answers or feedback of what you are looking for, despite being reasonably confident you answered correctly -- even after having requested the feedback -- I had this experience at GitLab)
> We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game
I just don't understand this reasoning. Can someone explain differently?
I also agree with a later point -- no firm should have a "VP of Diversity and Inclusivity" but for different reasons.
I consider myself a competent developer, but I have no academic background as I am self-taught. While I have had a steady supply of work, because of this, I will most likely never get to work for a big company like Microsoft, Google or Facebook because I wouldn't pass their technical interview. I lack the understanding of core computer science principles and I am okay with admitting that, I don't think it makes me a bad developer or inferior to my peers who have computer science degrees. Most developers I know envy the fact I have no student debt and said if they could do it over again, they would go the self-taught route.
Technical interviews are broken because they favour developers fresh out of college or with academic backgrounds. Not every development task is a coding problem or puzzle, rarely do you ever need to write your own algorithm implementation in real world situations. The times you do, most developers (even the intelligent ones) will Google. My problem solving ability is decent enough I am at a senior level and always complete what is asked of me, but give me a code golf/coding puzzle and unrealistic constraints like only being able to solve it on a whiteboard? I will fail. Ask me to solve problems on sheets of paper as quick as possible? I will fail.
Give me a laptop, an IDE and ask me to build something. Better yet, sit me down with one of the developers in your team, give me a simple Jira task and ask me to help solve it pair-programming style. I would rather hire a developer who can get things done opposed to being able to solve a non-real world programming puzzle I found on Google. Interviews seem to forgo the highly acknowledged fact that developers rely on Google/StackOverflow than companies care to admit.
Problem solving is one percentage of the hiring equation, being a great developer also requires patience, cooperation, understanding and communication. I think above anything else, a developer who is a good communicator is a dream combination. I would take communication skills over coding puzzle solving skills any day of the week.
Even the much beloved FizzBuzz test is a scam. Any developer can memorize a FizzBuzz implementation 10 minutes prior to the interview. I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up. Maybe it worked in 1999, but not in 2016.
I'm one of the people who ask those algorithm/white board questions. I've read a lot criticism on this topic, here're my reasons to stil keep asking these questions:
1) Working on algorithm problem requires very little in common between interviewer and interviewee. I'm C++/C#, I won't be able to give Ruby dev a real world task and evaluate it properly. Algo/data structure problems are universal and looks similar in any language.
In my practice I completely failed to make any conclusions by talking about previous experience. It was not clear to me what person actually did vs what was already on the project, may as well just fixed couple UI bugs on the complex project. This part might be might personal failure as interviewer, but it was it is, and I've seen enough developers with years of experience who barely code. So unfortunately having great resume doesn't prove anything.
2) Everyone knows that big tech companies ask these questions. Knowing that you didn't take to prepare, says one of two things to me: you don't find it interesting topic/usefull or you don't have enough grit to go thru that.
When I prepared for the interview I went thru two algo books, it took some time but it was easy for me, I did enjoy the learning part, yes it's not something I use every day. But learning things is a trait of good developer, knowing fundamentals if part of that. Some folks found it useless, but since it's known fact that's being asked on interiewes, motivated developer would spend time and learn it. Over the years at work, we have to learn things that are not interesting and that I'd rather choose not to know at all, same as algorithms to some people. If you can't make yourself learn algorithms to pass interview, likely you wont learn things for the work too.
Yeah... FizzBuzz still works. A large percentage of phone screens fails it. It's not meant to be a signal you're a good developer if you pass, it's meant as a signal you're an atrociously bad one if you fail. Most people don't bother to even memorize it, and those who memorize are thrown by slight variations.
> While I have had a steady supply of work, because of this, I will most likely never get to work for a big company like Microsoft, Google or Facebook because I wouldn't pass their technical interview.
The stuff people complain about (big O, data structures, algorithms in theory) are stuff even us with degrees have to study and relearn before job interviews. I think you might be underselling yourself. Those big companies use questions like this (often instead of hard checks for degrees) specifically to allow self-taught coders who are good an opportunity to get in.
To some extent, as other have posted, it is kind of silly, but you might be able to look at it as a leveling of the playing field.
> I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up.
It's not--it's a metric for determining unsuitability.
Honestly, the more I read about all those "diversity initiatives", "outreach campaigns" and "pushes to increase H1B" caps - the more I wonder about the intent and motivation of the people pulling the strings and funding the groups fighting so hard to further those causes. My comment is only tangentially related to hiring practices.
Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously starts to look like an organized campaign to 1/ increase the supply of engineers in the valley 2/ increase competition for access to a limited supply of jobs 3/ maintain engineers as a inexpensive, replaceable and unorganized workforce (in the face of increasing demand).
To address the diversity numbers of Facebook, I wonder what are they exactly suggesting when they mean that it is not "diverse"? At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". To clear that out and maybe find out that I am mistaken, I want to know with what kind of demographic breakdown would proponents of diversity be pleased. Should it follow the US racial distribution? Or have equal proportions of people from each race?
Finally, I think that a breakdown according to class would be much more interesting than this document. Since race is only skin deep, I do believe that having people from all walks of life would be a better optima than having people of different colors (that are all upper middle class).
Not that any interview process is perfect, but another reason why the current process is not going away, is sheer convenience, especially for the fast growing core tech companies that don't have a pipeline problem. When you have hundreds of people applying for any open role, and you're under pressure to deliver products quarter after quarter, your incentive is to stick to a process that gives reasonable results, fast enough.
e.g. Google has estimated 40K engineers. With a 10 year average time on job (it's probably less), G is hiring 40K engineers every 10 years just to sustain itself. That's a massive operation and the incentive of any company at that scale, is to design a multi-layer, fast process. They are looking for 40K engineers that pass that process, not necessarily 40k best engineers from their pipeline.
Considering diversity with that little attention span is possible, but very hard to do. And like you said, technology is possibly the only way diversity hiring can be encouraged/enforced.
I think the conversation about diversity in tech often overlooks a key metric, which is the percentage of tech companies that are founded by and/or employ a majority of minorities.
For example, if its accurate to say that over 88% of US tech companies are founded by white people and employ mostly white people, then a diversity issue exists in the number of tech companies founded by black people and employing mostly black people.
As a black american, it's interesting that the approach to tech diversity so often revolves around the concept of hiring minorities to help fulfil the goals of existing (mostly white) companies.
An approach that feels more altruistic to me would be to empower minorities to build their own tech companies to solve their own types of problems, and hire people who are a good 'culture fit.'
Instead of diversifying employees, diversify the companies and let them naturally attract diverse employees.
>Unstructured interviews reliably degrade the decisions of gatekeepers (e.g. hiring and admissions officers, parole boards, etc.). Gatekeepers (and SPRs) make better decisions on the basis of dossiers alone than on the basis of dossiers and unstructured interviews. (Bloom and Brundage 1947, DeVaul et. al. 1957, Oskamp 1965, Milstein et. al. 1981; Hunter & Hunter 1984; Wiesner & Cronshaw 1988). If you're hiring, you're probably better off not doing interviews.
The "make candidate solve puzzles" technical interview sounds like a very poorly designed IQ test. Just replacing it with more objective standardized IQ tests would help a lot.
Why diversity is needed to be fixed in the first place? Pizza business is dominated by italians and kebap by turkish, and nobody tries to fix diversity issues in those industries. Somehow every industry finds its own best people and the balance, I don't understand the need of fixing it. Nursery is dominated by women and men are underpresented there, should we also fix it?
I've seen a number of tech interviews where the interviewer has played down candidates that were better than them (consciously or not). I've also been a interviewee many times and sensed a one-upmanship from the interviewer(s), and subsequently avoid those companies. I could easily see this also being another factor if someone isn't in tune with the norms of the industry to call BS and walk.
It's more than fixing the technical interview process. Bottom line is western culture does not raise daughters to succeed in tech. From my own experiences 80% of the chemists I've worked with (including leadership) are female - so it's not a total failure in STEM education.
> We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest…
Turns out, people who are bad at technical interviews, are underrepresented at companies who use technical interviews to hire employees.
I've been in software tech for nearly 30 years. Never had a "technical" interview, puzzle solving, or anything like that. I would not take a job that screened candidates that way.
If references and credentials and track record aren't enough, I would look elsewhere.
They have a big figure labelled "People Can't Gauge Their Own Interview Perfomance", which shows that when the interviewer and interviee rated the perfomance on a 1-4 scale, 46% of candidates guessed their exact score, and another 45% were off by one.
That seems pretty good to me. Can you really expect any more agreement than that?
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
On the hiring side, "For the specific case of an online job posting, on average, 1,000 individuals will see a job post, 200 will begin the application process, 100 will complete the application, 75 of those 100 resumes will be screened out by either the ATS or a recruiter, 25 resumes will be seen by the hiring manager, 4 to 6 will be invited for an interview, 1 to 3 of them will be invited back for final interview, 1 will be offered that job and 80 percent of those receiving an offer will accept it (Talent Function Group LLC)." This implies that 80% of interviews lead to rejection.
Given that level of rejection, the key here is to get women to know the odds and keep trying.
[+] [-] taneq|9 years ago|reply
It's not an issue of 'explaining' the odds. It's an issue of women knowing that they're worth something in and of themselves, competing against men who are motivated by a lifetime of experience telling that if they can't achieve, they are nothing.
[+] [-] divbit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] FT_intern|9 years ago|reply
not exactly. The numbers show that women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing, but they do not show why that happens.
Is it because women are more lazy, less motivated or crack more frequently under pressure?
Who knows.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rdlecler1|9 years ago|reply
And this doesn't have to be just women, it could be anyone with a genetic or cultural predisposition (reducing diversity at least in personality types). Lot's of selection for monoculture here.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mzw_mzw|9 years ago|reply
Now that's an important fact that tends to get overlooked. Ninety-nine percent of the agitation about increasing "representation" tends to focus on accusing everyone of misogyny and attempting to destroy existing culture. But increasing the confidence level of female applicants, so they aren't put off by immediate rejection, could be a much less destructive way of achieving the goal.
[+] [-] imaginenore|9 years ago|reply
Maybe, just maybe, women don't want all of that, and we're collectively pushing them (in the name of equality of outcome) to something they don't care for? If you look at the stats, women in more egalitarian societies (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) are much less likely to choose IT over less egalitarian ones.
[+] [-] cloudjacker|9 years ago|reply
For reference, what is this saying about how many of those that stop practicing are men?
7 times more likely than what? I haven't read the article yet. Any given individual is how likely to 'stop practicing' after a rejection? 10% if man, 70% if woman? 1% if man, 7% if woman?
[+] [-] rdlecler1|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jlebrech|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ksenzee|9 years ago|reply
That's getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. The real key here is to fix the interviewing process, like the article said. Quit with the cargo-cult technical questions that don't mean anything, and just _talk_ to people.
[+] [-] balls187|9 years ago|reply
I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.
[+] [-] T2_t2|9 years ago|reply
And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE.
When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks.
Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE is a Norwegian documentary on this, in 8 parts, and it is well worth a watch.
[+] [-] pj_mukh|9 years ago|reply
I am no expert, maybe it has something to do with maternity leave regimes or the interviews (like OP mentions)?
[+] [-] avasylev|9 years ago|reply
Situation with lack of female developers is not US-specific. I went to college in Ukraine, of ~100 sudents on computer science faculty, less than 10 were woman.
[+] [-] avasylev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Manishearth|9 years ago|reply
This in particular is the concept of a "model minority".
Culture difference cannot explain why women are not well represented in tech.
Culture difference can be a part of systemic bias, anyway. Let's say you have some programming job. The interviews focus on questions about frobbing linked lists (which is often the case). Now, it turns out that people from demographic A are more likely to focus on these questions when practicing for interviews, whereas demographic B focuses on honing the skill set they need for the actual job (algorithmy linked list stuff may not be necessary at all!).
You'd say that it's not possible for /culture/ to change how you study. There's hard evidence against that -- take India for example, CS students in India focus a lot on solving typical interview questions and less so on other skills. This stems from the general culture of finding and using a formulaic method of succeeding at academics. I don't like this culture (it ultimately leads to cases like kids who can solve whatever they need in quiz papers but don't actually understand the topic), and always have spoken out against it, but it's there.
But, you say, that's a different country, what about a minority demographic within the same country? Firstly, minorities more often than not are segregated into their own communities (socially, if not physically) due to various voluntary and involuntary reasons, and the effect can be the same as being in a different country (albeit milder).
Now realize that an interviewer will probably design questions around the kind that they are used to and that they (and their peers) would do well with. This is an unconscious bias -- interview questions are more often than not tests of how similar you are to the (often non-diverse) peer group of the interviewer, and not actually a test of how good you are as a candidate. This is an association fallacy, "all people like my peer group are good programmers, hence all good programmers are like my peer group". Of course, interviewing is often about avoiding bad programmers much more than it is about hiring good ones -- generally folks are okay with accidentally not hiring a good programmer, but want to avoid hiring a bad one at all costs. Thus tweaking your interview process to target a subset of the set of all good programmers isn't that bad, is it? Except that this targeting carries an unconscious bias inside it, and unfairly ends up disproportionately excluding minorities. If you're going to use a process prone to false negatives on purpose, be damn sure that the likelihood of someone being a false negative is in no way correlated with the demographic they are from. You may not have designed the process with this correlation in mind (hence, "unconscious bias"), but this bias is still there.
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And it doesn't have to be culture differences. You have a lot of other behavioral differences due to economic status or demographic which are unconsciously excluded in interviews. E.g. women are less likely to apply for jobs where they do not have all the listed qualifications, but men are very likely to apply, and get hired, because not all the qualifications were necessary anyway. The fix here is to be clear on what you absolutely need in a candidate, and what would be "nice to have".
And it doesn't have to be behavioral differences either. Sometimes it has to do with defining your inputs. Many companies focus on hiring from a set of people which itself is biased. It can be by hiring only from certain colleges (and then inexplicably whining about the "pipeline" -- you chose the pipeline!). It can be from having unconscious or conscious discrimination against autodidacts. Or code bootcamp folks. If you restrict your inputs to an already biased source, you will get biased results.
There are tons and tons of articles and papers out there about this. These aren't unknown effects. They're well established.
None of this is on purpose, of course (at least, I hope it isn't!). But it's still a bias, even if it's unconscious. And the onus is on the creators of the bias to fix it.
There are a million reasons out there why various demographics aren't well-represented in tech. It's just lazy to blame it on the demographics and say "it's cultural differences" without realizing the mistakes made by tech cos in making culture a factor in the first place.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pasquinelli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanleydrew|9 years ago|reply
This reveals a complete misunderstanding of how "systemic bias" occurs and persists.
[Edited with further thoughts]
"Cultural differences" don't just appear out of nowhere. Culture itself is an amalgamation of different human experiences that have combined and recombined over tens of thousands of years. It's not static. The things you deem "cultural differences" have many causes, and "differences" can and do change all the time.
When we throw up our hands and say "cultural differences", it implies that we don't need to ask why such differences might exist and whether we should actively seek to change them. That's an important conversation.
"Systemic bias" may or may not exist in this case, but if you think cultural differences themselves can't lead to systemic bias then you are mistaken.
[+] [-] dreta|9 years ago|reply
I understand that people here hate technical interviews, but are we going to skip over the fact that the whole premise of this article is that the technical interview is awful for everybody, but minorities are more affected, because their poor little brains can’t figure that out? It’s ridiculous that you’d ever even propose that some "VP of Diversity and Inclusion” has anything to do with hiring of engineers. Why is this garbage being given any thought on HN is baffling to me.
[+] [-] 234dd57d2c8db|9 years ago|reply
Here's a question: if there's such a demand for solutions that solve a problem that the "majority" can't see, why don't women and minorities just start their own companies to solve those problems and make piles of $$$?
Reality check: building a good team is a struggle for every race, culture, gender, and individual in every industry on the planet. I get it though, it's a lot easier to mooch off of actual engineers who build solutions and then act like they had some significant impact as the "Director of Diversity".
Keep riding those coat-tails, maybe one day you will invent something on your own that isn't pseudo-scientific bullshit and actually improves people's lives. Go on, I DARE you to run your own startup and actually try to hire good help. You'll quickly find you have no time for such nonsense and only care about getting $*!@& done.
[+] [-] bit_logic|9 years ago|reply
And then the real downward spiral began with the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview. More books were published, a whole industry to support this. Then came the sites like leetcode and HackerRank. Now there's a lot of money supporting and pushing for continuing this stupid process. And the arms race just keeps getting worse and worse. The interviewers expect more and more obscure algorithms and data structures and justify it with "must avoid false positives". This just increases the study time for candidates and they're willing to spend time and money to do it. And the tech interview industry (all the books and sites) are happy to push this arms race since it's more money for them. Now they have enough money to go openly defend the tech interview as the "best practice".
It's not even enough to get the right answer now. You have to do it fast enough or you fail. And now they care about syntax on a whiteboard. None of this used to be true. It all started as a way to see how you approach a problem and discussing it. No expectations that you would correctly get Algorithm ABC and Data Structure XYZ. No expectation that the syntax is correct, pseudo code was ok. No expectation even on a complete working solution, the point was just to see if you can reason about the problem.
All that is gone, replaced by the tech interview arms race. Now it's just a massive speed pattern matching contest to see if you've studied enough to hopefully cover the obscure problem the interviewer will pick and if you can correctly pattern match in time based on the hundreds of questions you did on leetcode. Completely useless and against the original intent of tech interviews.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|9 years ago|reply
Herein lies the scam. (Disclaimer: It's not on purpose, they're lying to themselves too)
Just because you have a process to produce a "concrete" result, that doesn't mean it doesn't stand on a house of cards.
I'd have to sit and have a think to make a clearer explanation than by analogy, so here's an analogy. This reminds me of the way people with an insufficient anti-authoritarian streak are more willing to question a person's on the spot decision than a decision from systematic, bureaucracy or law.
Just because more time and process has gone into establishing them, doesn't necessitate that the decisions are any better founded than what some rando pulls out of their ass.
Because, at the end of the day, taking the technical portion of the interview itself too seriously is the real fraud. There is exactly one way to tell how well someone will be able to contribute to our team, with our technologies, in our environment after a few weeks of getting up to speed. And that's to hire them.
The technical portion of the interview isn't useful beyond a low-bar rule-out criteria. After that, the technical portion turns back towards the softer skills of how the interviewee handles hitting a wall at problem solving in a field where nobody knows everything.
[+] [-] shados|9 years ago|reply
The current environment in tech is as follow: Someone goes through an interview process. Depending on the result, they get brought in or not. If they are brought in, they accept an offer. Usually it will contain some kind of language about blah blah trial period 3 months blah blah, sometimes in precise terminology, sometimes vaguely.
If someone is absolutely useless right off the bat, immediately everyone's like "but but we need to coach them, they just started, they'll get better". If after 3 months they're still useless, then it's "Blah blah it's the company's responsibility to keep them around and coach them because we hired them and we failed at interview".
That can only happen so many times (and can ruin teams or entire companies) before you start getting downright paranoid when interviewing. Maybe you have a lot of false positive and false negative, but if your interview process is Google-like enough, on average you'll turn out okay-ish (source: Google/Facebook/Netflix/whatever other company with such an interview process. They have some pretty strong teams in there). But since it's so hard to get rid of a bad apple, you can't take risks (Im being told Netflix is good at getting rid of people).
Change the game a bit: make it easy to get rid of bad apples early on. You know the interview process is bad anyway. Give people a chance. If they're actually competent, they have nothing to worry about. They'll get hired, prove their worth, and stick around. If they're bad, well, bye bye. Then we no longer have to rely on excruciatingly stupid interview processes.
A lot of people think this is inhumane/heartless. That big evil corporations MUST provide people with jobs and must keep them no matter how bad they are because they have bills to pay. I say its heartless to not give people a chance to prove themselves (or to fail while at least trying).
[+] [-] throwaway3586|9 years ago|reply
Yet amazingly, the charges that tech "lacks diversity," is "too white," or even "overwhelmingly white"[1][2][3] haven't let up even as the hard data refuting them has become available, and may even have intensified. In fact, many of these critics, like the author of the linked article, actually attempt to use the very data that refutes their point to somehow support it--an indication, perhaps, of the "post-fact" era leftists so often complain we're now living in.
Little wonder is it then that Trump's white supporters despise journalists so much, considering how deeply so many journalists seem to despise white Americans.
1) http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-male...
2) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/02/googles-s...
3) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/...
[+] [-] treehau5|9 years ago|reply
> We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game
I just don't understand this reasoning. Can someone explain differently?
I also agree with a later point -- no firm should have a "VP of Diversity and Inclusivity" but for different reasons.
[+] [-] DigitalSea|9 years ago|reply
Technical interviews are broken because they favour developers fresh out of college or with academic backgrounds. Not every development task is a coding problem or puzzle, rarely do you ever need to write your own algorithm implementation in real world situations. The times you do, most developers (even the intelligent ones) will Google. My problem solving ability is decent enough I am at a senior level and always complete what is asked of me, but give me a code golf/coding puzzle and unrealistic constraints like only being able to solve it on a whiteboard? I will fail. Ask me to solve problems on sheets of paper as quick as possible? I will fail.
Give me a laptop, an IDE and ask me to build something. Better yet, sit me down with one of the developers in your team, give me a simple Jira task and ask me to help solve it pair-programming style. I would rather hire a developer who can get things done opposed to being able to solve a non-real world programming puzzle I found on Google. Interviews seem to forgo the highly acknowledged fact that developers rely on Google/StackOverflow than companies care to admit.
Problem solving is one percentage of the hiring equation, being a great developer also requires patience, cooperation, understanding and communication. I think above anything else, a developer who is a good communicator is a dream combination. I would take communication skills over coding puzzle solving skills any day of the week.
Even the much beloved FizzBuzz test is a scam. Any developer can memorize a FizzBuzz implementation 10 minutes prior to the interview. I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up. Maybe it worked in 1999, but not in 2016.
[+] [-] avasylev|9 years ago|reply
1) Working on algorithm problem requires very little in common between interviewer and interviewee. I'm C++/C#, I won't be able to give Ruby dev a real world task and evaluate it properly. Algo/data structure problems are universal and looks similar in any language. In my practice I completely failed to make any conclusions by talking about previous experience. It was not clear to me what person actually did vs what was already on the project, may as well just fixed couple UI bugs on the complex project. This part might be might personal failure as interviewer, but it was it is, and I've seen enough developers with years of experience who barely code. So unfortunately having great resume doesn't prove anything.
2) Everyone knows that big tech companies ask these questions. Knowing that you didn't take to prepare, says one of two things to me: you don't find it interesting topic/usefull or you don't have enough grit to go thru that. When I prepared for the interview I went thru two algo books, it took some time but it was easy for me, I did enjoy the learning part, yes it's not something I use every day. But learning things is a trait of good developer, knowing fundamentals if part of that. Some folks found it useless, but since it's known fact that's being asked on interiewes, motivated developer would spend time and learn it. Over the years at work, we have to learn things that are not interesting and that I'd rather choose not to know at all, same as algorithms to some people. If you can't make yourself learn algorithms to pass interview, likely you wont learn things for the work too.
[+] [-] groby_b|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moduspwnens14|9 years ago|reply
The stuff people complain about (big O, data structures, algorithms in theory) are stuff even us with degrees have to study and relearn before job interviews. I think you might be underselling yourself. Those big companies use questions like this (often instead of hard checks for degrees) specifically to allow self-taught coders who are good an opportunity to get in.
To some extent, as other have posted, it is kind of silly, but you might be able to look at it as a leveling of the playing field.
> I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up.
It's not--it's a metric for determining unsuitability.
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
Well, they're far from the ones with the hardest interviews.
[+] [-] AvenueIngres|9 years ago|reply
Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously starts to look like an organized campaign to 1/ increase the supply of engineers in the valley 2/ increase competition for access to a limited supply of jobs 3/ maintain engineers as a inexpensive, replaceable and unorganized workforce (in the face of increasing demand).
To address the diversity numbers of Facebook, I wonder what are they exactly suggesting when they mean that it is not "diverse"? At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". To clear that out and maybe find out that I am mistaken, I want to know with what kind of demographic breakdown would proponents of diversity be pleased. Should it follow the US racial distribution? Or have equal proportions of people from each race?
Finally, I think that a breakdown according to class would be much more interesting than this document. Since race is only skin deep, I do believe that having people from all walks of life would be a better optima than having people of different colors (that are all upper middle class).
[+] [-] soham|9 years ago|reply
Thanks Aline. Excellent article, as always.
Not that any interview process is perfect, but another reason why the current process is not going away, is sheer convenience, especially for the fast growing core tech companies that don't have a pipeline problem. When you have hundreds of people applying for any open role, and you're under pressure to deliver products quarter after quarter, your incentive is to stick to a process that gives reasonable results, fast enough.
e.g. Google has estimated 40K engineers. With a 10 year average time on job (it's probably less), G is hiring 40K engineers every 10 years just to sustain itself. That's a massive operation and the incentive of any company at that scale, is to design a multi-layer, fast process. They are looking for 40K engineers that pass that process, not necessarily 40k best engineers from their pipeline.
Considering diversity with that little attention span is possible, but very hard to do. And like you said, technology is possibly the only way diversity hiring can be encouraged/enforced.
[+] [-] tuxidomasx|9 years ago|reply
For example, if its accurate to say that over 88% of US tech companies are founded by white people and employ mostly white people, then a diversity issue exists in the number of tech companies founded by black people and employing mostly black people.
As a black american, it's interesting that the approach to tech diversity so often revolves around the concept of hiring minorities to help fulfil the goals of existing (mostly white) companies.
An approach that feels more altruistic to me would be to empower minorities to build their own tech companies to solve their own types of problems, and hire people who are a good 'culture fit.'
Instead of diversifying employees, diversify the companies and let them naturally attract diverse employees.
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
>Unstructured interviews reliably degrade the decisions of gatekeepers (e.g. hiring and admissions officers, parole boards, etc.). Gatekeepers (and SPRs) make better decisions on the basis of dossiers alone than on the basis of dossiers and unstructured interviews. (Bloom and Brundage 1947, DeVaul et. al. 1957, Oskamp 1965, Milstein et. al. 1981; Hunter & Hunter 1984; Wiesner & Cronshaw 1988). If you're hiring, you're probably better off not doing interviews.
The "make candidate solve puzzles" technical interview sounds like a very poorly designed IQ test. Just replacing it with more objective standardized IQ tests would help a lot.
[+] [-] cagataygurturk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Moshe_Silnorin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xorgar831|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aplomb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|9 years ago|reply
Turns out, people who are bad at technical interviews, are underrepresented at companies who use technical interviews to hire employees.
[+] [-] ams6110|9 years ago|reply
If references and credentials and track record aren't enough, I would look elsewhere.
[+] [-] vilhelm_s|9 years ago|reply
That seems pretty good to me. Can you really expect any more agreement than that?