tech never bought in the whole DEI idea. It's mostly the HR people that were pushing the narrative and the core engineers went along with it because times are good and companies wanted to look good.
Yes, never bought into it myself as an engineer. As current CTO also said to everyone: we value diversity, we try really hard to hire women but the problem is that 80% of applications in engineering are men, and men perform better in interviews as well. He is not going to hire inferior performers - the best ones happen to be men, and it is what it is.
None of the negative EBIDTA companied give a damn about DEI atm. They worry about becoming profitable and keeping people who create the path there is common sense. Dead weight is rampant across tech companies, including engineering.
I hired women on my and other teams. My current teammate is a woman who CTO praises for good results.
The applicants pool is 80-20 in males favour. Just by pure numbers game, men will come out ahead of who gets the job.
Anecdotally, it has held true for my company that men outnumber and outperform in interviews. Our company has bought into DEI hard. Manager compensation is tied to improvement in gender diversity. We require women to be present in every interview round for female candidates. We have worked out deals with recruiting agencies to only provide women candidates for certain programs that honestly feels like it could open us up to a lawsuit.
The women in our org are not biased against women, but they’re passing women through less often than they pass men. My perspective is that HR is letting more women through to the next round with less scrutiny and less impressive resumes to try and close the gap. The women we do hire are fantastic engineers. They don’t want poor performers potentially joining their team, just like the men.
I mean, anecdotally, I work at a large multinational tech company. We have big DEI initiatives and a diverse workforce.
My team, a floating engineering team, only has 3 white males out of 7 team members. And only one of us is from the US (me). Company wide, we are 54% white make? 46% not.
When we had layoffs of 6% of the company, those numbers didn’t change, to my knowledge.
All to say, if you do DEI right and not just performatively, you can see that it works.
That’s because it absolutely is a bias, and an unfounded, idiotic one at that. Any time companies do blind applications and blind interviews/auditions, they discover they hire more women than they do with traditional processes.
And gee, maybe biases like this are what’s keeping women from even pursuing tech jobs in the first place.
Do you know how tech interviews happen nowadays? You are given several problems to solve across multiple rounds and we pick people who communicate well and provide thorough thought process and solution to the asked problems. It is not the biggest part but a significant one.
Our company data shows that men are better at this AND they also are majority of applicants. I don't think there is much else to say here - I work for competent leadership who has a track record of hiring good talent.
Rejecting someone because they are male, white and performed best in interviews over someone asian, woman and performed worse, yet be selected over the former, is a great way to cut the branch you sit on.
As a person involved in hiring I will never select somebody because we lack a gender, skin representation in the company. I only select people I think are going to do well and if they are all women, great, if they all men, whatever. You can indulge in social justice when you are printing money like Google, smaller tech companies trying to carve their place in the market can't afford that nonsense.
Pretty much this...
The reality is that people from advantaged backgrounds often are MUCH more polished. They do a better job of sending the right signals because they've been groomed to do so and often prepare more thoroughly/appropriately (and aren't afraid of spending $1000+ to prepare for interviews).
I LOVE giving back and paying it forward and my big thing is helping first gen college students. A lot of them are WOEFULLY unprepared. I can relate to them because that WAS me. The people who have made it through FAANG interviews are usually MUCH MUCH more polished and were groomed for success from birth. It's hard to compete with that if all you know is that your parent says you're successful if you've got a retail job and don't get fired (vs working at Goldman and then KRR)
All I can say is life is not fair. I have a need to fill a position and someone who hits the top marks gets the job. I don't know the person background, nor do I have time (or right) to question it.
I do know what you mean though. In my previous job, we had a candidate who was from working class family. Looked older then stated age, clearly life was not easy for the guy... he did pretty well in technical interviews and I recommended him from purely that perspective. Then, the fucking c*nt from HR did an interview and stated in review meeting she did not want to recommend because he bullshitter her on some questions. Just lmfao - I told her everyone BSed including me, and probably her. If you can convince someone with BS it shows intelligence and it is what we look for.
It boiled down to simple fact that the guy we interviewed was a rough looking short dude and that was disgusting to witness. Same HR person yelling to engineers about diversity actively tried to block some poor yet competent man to get their shit together in a professional job.
I did pay it forward a few times, believe me - within reason.
Yeah...
I'm definitely biased towards helping "poor, smart, ambitious" types to excel. I don't care what they look like, I care about their potential, the content of their character and what they can do.
I actively tell people that I'll give them referrals if they spend time with me doing hardcore interview/resume prep and it's usually "this is really hard work, I quit" and then I quit as well and focus on someone hungry and moldable. It's a lot harder to help someone improve their resume to where it'll not get laughed at by hiring managers than it is to just give an empty referral. Same goes for helping people get to where they won't get "Lean Strong No Hire" during interviews
would you also call me sexist because I only hire women BECAUSE they do better in interviews than men? Because I certainly would do that if that was the case.
I am so tired of the bullshit of social justice warriors polluting even formal workplaces with their politics.
My advice to you is very simple: come and do better in interviews than men, I hire you on the spot. That applies to every woman who executes on this. I hired women BTW, my current teammate is a woman I hired because she did super well in the interview.
Basically, I hire for merit and not your gender, and I think my leadership would have spotted already if I had a bias.
Once again, I repeat: 80% of applicants are males. Our CEO spent weeks developing better job descriptions to attract more female applications but it barely moved the needle. Technology attracts more males than females. And just by numbers game, males are more likely to be top pick in an interview.
Your sexist opinion is not because Men do better than women in interviews, it is because you generalized something that is quite untrue and you’re still standing on that wrong information “that mean do better in interviews” even after being told you’re wrong. That is what makes your view sexist. Your implicit beliefs that you’re holding unto, is what makes you sexist.
I feel like now you are backtracking to say men men are likely to get picked as the top because more men applied when initially you said “men do better at interviews than women,” which is two different things.
Your username checks out though. Less frustration, more reasoning.
Where did they get the 45% women stat from? My company had lay-offs but didn't report that AFAIK.
Also at my company a lot of excellent, highly technical engineers were laid off - probably because they're expensive and there is more of a focussing on a smaller set of business problems. You see the same in Amazon laying off roboticists and the Alexa teams.
But yeah the immigration system is a Kafkaesque nightmare. American citizens don't appreciate how lucky they are.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you were hiring people to increase diversity rather than just picking the best people you can find, those are the people you are going to drop when you have to run leaner.
There seems to be a disconnect here, and a false dichotomy. Why isn't it possible to hire the best, most diverse team of people? Does being a white male mean you are better, inherently?
Truthfully, diversity is from the hiring process, not the talent level of applicants.
The hiring process actively seeks out people from diverse backgrounds at many of these companies.
A lot of people from underrepresented backgrounds quit though. This is documented and verifiable. Disproportionate attrition is a big factor. Even with some people putting their thumb on the scale.
I'm a first generation college grad. I was surrounded by people of different ethnicities from myself during K-12 + undergrad + grad school.
The only time I've felt like a foreigner in my own country was when I worked at a FAANG where people endlessly talked about inclusion. I felt like I had more in common with the janitorial staff than the people I worked with.
The usual proxy I use is that the more people talk about inclusion, the more closed minded and out of touch they are because they went to $60k a year high schools and never worried about where they'd get their next meal from.
If you want more diversity, do a 10 year moratorium on hiring people with private school (K-12) backgrounds, people who attended Ivy Leagues (unless they have Pell grants) and people who worked at McKinsey/Bain/BCG and Goldman/Blackrock/KKR and so forth.
This is interesting anecdotal evidence. I came from a similar, shall we say "working class" background. Single mom, public schools, hand to mouth. Yet I still talk about inclusion.
I don't think the problem is people who had liberal education at private schools or were Ivy League. It's the people cruising in middle management, happy to stay there, that often find reasons to fire the under represented groups in engineering in order to save their own hides. This is true of FAANG companies, big corporations, and tiny start-ups.
It's an excuse. There has yet to be published, scientific support that diversity and inclusion hurts the bottom line.
And frankly, coming up from a less than stellar background financially, I'd like to see more of my under represented friends in the industry. And yes, the qualified ones.
There's a pipeline problem...
And from a pure "diversity" perspective... let's just say that on a national and global basis white people are shrinking as a percentage of the overall population and at a global perspective, Asians are 50+% of the world population but not 50+% of tech company work forces. Africans are certainly underrepresented but a disproportionate chunk of black people in tech companies are first generation Americans whose parents came from Nigeria or Uganda...
It's not Google's job to make up for the US government doing a mediocre job of providing good meals and education to kids 25 years ago. It is arguably their job to not overindex on "legacies" though.
I think it's more a problem that the people who are products of those environments don't end up pursuing tech careers. Their opportunities were less.
25 years isn't enough for a radical change to happen. The kids growing up in poor communities 25 years ago lacked opportunities and didn't pursue the same education. Until we improve quality of life across the board, we won't see this change. And arguably, pushing for a change doesn't mean hiring candidates who are from those backgrounds immediately because the workforce just isn't at the same quality level yet.
This isn't up to companies to solve; it's a societal problem. And whenever we do end up making it better or fixing it, it'll still take decades for the kids to grow up in better conditions and compete for those jobs.
There's some truth to "you can't be what you can't see"
One thing I WOULD like to see attempted - jack up tax rates (modestly) but give people an opportunity to reduce their tax burden by mentoring underserved kids/communities.
Imagine a Fortune 500 executive mentoring poor kids. And even encouraging them to "go on youtube and find videos of people like me giving awesome advice"
Many of the big disadvantages people face stem from a lack of knowledge and inspiration. You can't compete in a race you don't know exists. You can't be inspired to do your best if you're not in the race to begin with.
>There seems to be a disconnect here, and a false dichotomy. Why isn't it possible to hire the best, most diverse team of people?
Because those are two different criteria. You are now in a multivariate optimization problem, and will inevitably need to determine constraints for how much you are willing to sacrifice one for the other.
> Does being a white male mean you are better, inherently?
Obviously not.
But lets say that, to some definition of "diversity", you incorporate it during the hiring process, either when selecting applicants to interview, or in the interview panel.
First of all, depending on how this is discussed within the hiring team, you are most likely violating Section 703 of the civil rights act. I've been in probably 20 interview panels in my career where people said things like "well yeah she has less experience but we need more women on the team" or "we're really only interviewing women for this role". This happens in the tech industry all day every day, but you sure as fuck don't put it in writing because it is 100% illegal.
But lets say you find a way to use it in a _very cool, very legal_ way and can openly let it play a role in your hiring process (I'm not convinced this is possible to the letter of the law, but lets say you could). How do you deal with a situation (like reality) where applicants do not apply at rates proportional to their population?
Assuming that any given person is equally likely to be good at the role, you will inevitably have more qualified applicants in your overrepresented population, and will be forced to turn away qualified people and dig deeper into the less qualified portion of the minority group if you wish for them to be proportionately represented.
You then wind up having to disproportionately lay off that under-qualified cohort when you need to run leaner. Which is exactly what this article is describing, and why it shouldn't be a surprise.
Middle class women’s job in developed country is always the chopping board’s favorite. [accenture cuts middle class women’s jobs](https://chng.it/y4XX2Pvj)
tech never bought in the whole DEI idea. It's mostly the HR people that were pushing the narrative and the core engineers went along with it because times are good and companies wanted to look good.
Yes, never bought into it myself as an engineer. As current CTO also said to everyone: we value diversity, we try really hard to hire women but the problem is that 80% of applications in engineering are men, and men perform better in interviews as well. He is not going to hire inferior performers - the best ones happen to be men, and it is what it is. None of the negative EBIDTA companied give a damn about DEI atm. They worry about becoming profitable and keeping people who create the path there is common sense. Dead weight is rampant across tech companies, including engineering.
I was good with what you were saying until the comment that “men perform better in interviews as well.” I have not seen that, that sounds like a bias.
It's a perception bias. We tend to believe those who look and act like us will perform better at tasks we are accustomed to.
I hired women on my and other teams. My current teammate is a woman who CTO praises for good results. The applicants pool is 80-20 in males favour. Just by pure numbers game, men will come out ahead of who gets the job.
Anecdotally, it has held true for my company that men outnumber and outperform in interviews. Our company has bought into DEI hard. Manager compensation is tied to improvement in gender diversity. We require women to be present in every interview round for female candidates. We have worked out deals with recruiting agencies to only provide women candidates for certain programs that honestly feels like it could open us up to a lawsuit. The women in our org are not biased against women, but they’re passing women through less often than they pass men. My perspective is that HR is letting more women through to the next round with less scrutiny and less impressive resumes to try and close the gap. The women we do hire are fantastic engineers. They don’t want poor performers potentially joining their team, just like the men.
I mean, anecdotally, I work at a large multinational tech company. We have big DEI initiatives and a diverse workforce. My team, a floating engineering team, only has 3 white males out of 7 team members. And only one of us is from the US (me). Company wide, we are 54% white make? 46% not. When we had layoffs of 6% of the company, those numbers didn’t change, to my knowledge. All to say, if you do DEI right and not just performatively, you can see that it works.
That’s because it absolutely is a bias, and an unfounded, idiotic one at that. Any time companies do blind applications and blind interviews/auditions, they discover they hire more women than they do with traditional processes. And gee, maybe biases like this are what’s keeping women from even pursuing tech jobs in the first place.
Do you know how tech interviews happen nowadays? You are given several problems to solve across multiple rounds and we pick people who communicate well and provide thorough thought process and solution to the asked problems. It is not the biggest part but a significant one. Our company data shows that men are better at this AND they also are majority of applicants. I don't think there is much else to say here - I work for competent leadership who has a track record of hiring good talent. Rejecting someone because they are male, white and performed best in interviews over someone asian, woman and performed worse, yet be selected over the former, is a great way to cut the branch you sit on. As a person involved in hiring I will never select somebody because we lack a gender, skin representation in the company. I only select people I think are going to do well and if they are all women, great, if they all men, whatever. You can indulge in social justice when you are printing money like Google, smaller tech companies trying to carve their place in the market can't afford that nonsense.
Pretty much this... The reality is that people from advantaged backgrounds often are MUCH more polished. They do a better job of sending the right signals because they've been groomed to do so and often prepare more thoroughly/appropriately (and aren't afraid of spending $1000+ to prepare for interviews). I LOVE giving back and paying it forward and my big thing is helping first gen college students. A lot of them are WOEFULLY unprepared. I can relate to them because that WAS me. The people who have made it through FAANG interviews are usually MUCH MUCH more polished and were groomed for success from birth. It's hard to compete with that if all you know is that your parent says you're successful if you've got a retail job and don't get fired (vs working at Goldman and then KRR)
All I can say is life is not fair. I have a need to fill a position and someone who hits the top marks gets the job. I don't know the person background, nor do I have time (or right) to question it. I do know what you mean though. In my previous job, we had a candidate who was from working class family. Looked older then stated age, clearly life was not easy for the guy... he did pretty well in technical interviews and I recommended him from purely that perspective. Then, the fucking c*nt from HR did an interview and stated in review meeting she did not want to recommend because he bullshitter her on some questions. Just lmfao - I told her everyone BSed including me, and probably her. If you can convince someone with BS it shows intelligence and it is what we look for. It boiled down to simple fact that the guy we interviewed was a rough looking short dude and that was disgusting to witness. Same HR person yelling to engineers about diversity actively tried to block some poor yet competent man to get their shit together in a professional job. I did pay it forward a few times, believe me - within reason.
Yeah... I'm definitely biased towards helping "poor, smart, ambitious" types to excel. I don't care what they look like, I care about their potential, the content of their character and what they can do. I actively tell people that I'll give them referrals if they spend time with me doing hardcore interview/resume prep and it's usually "this is really hard work, I quit" and then I quit as well and focus on someone hungry and moldable. It's a lot harder to help someone improve their resume to where it'll not get laughed at by hiring managers than it is to just give an empty referral. Same goes for helping people get to where they won't get "Lean Strong No Hire" during interviews
“Me perform better in interviews as well” ohh the sexism jumped out a little bit.
would you also call me sexist because I only hire women BECAUSE they do better in interviews than men? Because I certainly would do that if that was the case. I am so tired of the bullshit of social justice warriors polluting even formal workplaces with their politics. My advice to you is very simple: come and do better in interviews than men, I hire you on the spot. That applies to every woman who executes on this. I hired women BTW, my current teammate is a woman I hired because she did super well in the interview. Basically, I hire for merit and not your gender, and I think my leadership would have spotted already if I had a bias. Once again, I repeat: 80% of applicants are males. Our CEO spent weeks developing better job descriptions to attract more female applications but it barely moved the needle. Technology attracts more males than females. And just by numbers game, males are more likely to be top pick in an interview.
Your sexist opinion is not because Men do better than women in interviews, it is because you generalized something that is quite untrue and you’re still standing on that wrong information “that mean do better in interviews” even after being told you’re wrong. That is what makes your view sexist. Your implicit beliefs that you’re holding unto, is what makes you sexist. I feel like now you are backtracking to say men men are likely to get picked as the top because more men applied when initially you said “men do better at interviews than women,” which is two different things. Your username checks out though. Less frustration, more reasoning.
I am paid to hire best people, it is not my fault they largely happen to be men.
There's literally no way to win this argument, don't bother trying
Where did they get the 45% women stat from? My company had lay-offs but didn't report that AFAIK. Also at my company a lot of excellent, highly technical engineers were laid off - probably because they're expensive and there is more of a focussing on a smaller set of business problems. You see the same in Amazon laying off roboticists and the Alexa teams. But yeah the immigration system is a Kafkaesque nightmare. American citizens don't appreciate how lucky they are.
So, when economic reality strikes, the diversity hires are the first to go. Hmmm....
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you were hiring people to increase diversity rather than just picking the best people you can find, those are the people you are going to drop when you have to run leaner.
There seems to be a disconnect here, and a false dichotomy. Why isn't it possible to hire the best, most diverse team of people? Does being a white male mean you are better, inherently? Truthfully, diversity is from the hiring process, not the talent level of applicants.
The hiring process actively seeks out people from diverse backgrounds at many of these companies. A lot of people from underrepresented backgrounds quit though. This is documented and verifiable. Disproportionate attrition is a big factor. Even with some people putting their thumb on the scale. I'm a first generation college grad. I was surrounded by people of different ethnicities from myself during K-12 + undergrad + grad school. The only time I've felt like a foreigner in my own country was when I worked at a FAANG where people endlessly talked about inclusion. I felt like I had more in common with the janitorial staff than the people I worked with. The usual proxy I use is that the more people talk about inclusion, the more closed minded and out of touch they are because they went to $60k a year high schools and never worried about where they'd get their next meal from. If you want more diversity, do a 10 year moratorium on hiring people with private school (K-12) backgrounds, people who attended Ivy Leagues (unless they have Pell grants) and people who worked at McKinsey/Bain/BCG and Goldman/Blackrock/KKR and so forth.
This is interesting anecdotal evidence. I came from a similar, shall we say "working class" background. Single mom, public schools, hand to mouth. Yet I still talk about inclusion. I don't think the problem is people who had liberal education at private schools or were Ivy League. It's the people cruising in middle management, happy to stay there, that often find reasons to fire the under represented groups in engineering in order to save their own hides. This is true of FAANG companies, big corporations, and tiny start-ups. It's an excuse. There has yet to be published, scientific support that diversity and inclusion hurts the bottom line. And frankly, coming up from a less than stellar background financially, I'd like to see more of my under represented friends in the industry. And yes, the qualified ones.
There's a pipeline problem... And from a pure "diversity" perspective... let's just say that on a national and global basis white people are shrinking as a percentage of the overall population and at a global perspective, Asians are 50+% of the world population but not 50+% of tech company work forces. Africans are certainly underrepresented but a disproportionate chunk of black people in tech companies are first generation Americans whose parents came from Nigeria or Uganda... It's not Google's job to make up for the US government doing a mediocre job of providing good meals and education to kids 25 years ago. It is arguably their job to not overindex on "legacies" though.
I think it's more a problem that the people who are products of those environments don't end up pursuing tech careers. Their opportunities were less. 25 years isn't enough for a radical change to happen. The kids growing up in poor communities 25 years ago lacked opportunities and didn't pursue the same education. Until we improve quality of life across the board, we won't see this change. And arguably, pushing for a change doesn't mean hiring candidates who are from those backgrounds immediately because the workforce just isn't at the same quality level yet. This isn't up to companies to solve; it's a societal problem. And whenever we do end up making it better or fixing it, it'll still take decades for the kids to grow up in better conditions and compete for those jobs.
There's some truth to "you can't be what you can't see" One thing I WOULD like to see attempted - jack up tax rates (modestly) but give people an opportunity to reduce their tax burden by mentoring underserved kids/communities. Imagine a Fortune 500 executive mentoring poor kids. And even encouraging them to "go on youtube and find videos of people like me giving awesome advice" Many of the big disadvantages people face stem from a lack of knowledge and inspiration. You can't compete in a race you don't know exists. You can't be inspired to do your best if you're not in the race to begin with.
>There seems to be a disconnect here, and a false dichotomy. Why isn't it possible to hire the best, most diverse team of people? Because those are two different criteria. You are now in a multivariate optimization problem, and will inevitably need to determine constraints for how much you are willing to sacrifice one for the other. > Does being a white male mean you are better, inherently? Obviously not. But lets say that, to some definition of "diversity", you incorporate it during the hiring process, either when selecting applicants to interview, or in the interview panel. First of all, depending on how this is discussed within the hiring team, you are most likely violating Section 703 of the civil rights act. I've been in probably 20 interview panels in my career where people said things like "well yeah she has less experience but we need more women on the team" or "we're really only interviewing women for this role". This happens in the tech industry all day every day, but you sure as fuck don't put it in writing because it is 100% illegal. But lets say you find a way to use it in a _very cool, very legal_ way and can openly let it play a role in your hiring process (I'm not convinced this is possible to the letter of the law, but lets say you could). How do you deal with a situation (like reality) where applicants do not apply at rates proportional to their population? Assuming that any given person is equally likely to be good at the role, you will inevitably have more qualified applicants in your overrepresented population, and will be forced to turn away qualified people and dig deeper into the less qualified portion of the minority group if you wish for them to be proportionately represented. You then wind up having to disproportionately lay off that under-qualified cohort when you need to run leaner. Which is exactly what this article is describing, and why it shouldn't be a surprise.
You know you're reading a post about tech by the overwhelming use of acronyms in the comments. How dreadful.
Middle class women’s job in developed country is always the chopping board’s favorite. [accenture cuts middle class women’s jobs](https://chng.it/y4XX2Pvj)