For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic (wired.com) 242
An anonymous reader shares a report: Eyre (an anecdote in the story) is one of more than 1,000 young women college-aged or older, hailing from 300 schools around the country, who participated in a recent survey [PDF] about the challenges female engineers face while applying for technical internships. The study was conducted last fall by Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization that educates and supports girls studying computer science, which has 30,000 college-aged alumnae and 17,000 alumnae potentially entering college this fall. The analysis was limited to young women in the Girls Who Code network who are studying or previously studied computer science and related fields.
The results reveal that many young women, whom the tech industry is counting on to diversify its heavily male workforce, are put off by their first encounters with tech companies. More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the interview process. Although the survey did not explicitly ask about sexual harassment and discrimination, respondents raised both issues in written responses at the end of the survey. They described instances where a male interviewer flirted with them during the interview, sent an unsolicited photo of himself, asked if they had a significant other, or made sexual remarks in their presence. The respondents also reported feeling dismissed or demeaned because of their gender. One respondent was asked why she would want to go into tech as a woman; in another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw herself becoming a software engineer in five years.
The results reveal that many young women, whom the tech industry is counting on to diversify its heavily male workforce, are put off by their first encounters with tech companies. More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the interview process. Although the survey did not explicitly ask about sexual harassment and discrimination, respondents raised both issues in written responses at the end of the survey. They described instances where a male interviewer flirted with them during the interview, sent an unsolicited photo of himself, asked if they had a significant other, or made sexual remarks in their presence. The respondents also reported feeling dismissed or demeaned because of their gender. One respondent was asked why she would want to go into tech as a woman; in another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw herself becoming a software engineer in five years.
Too easily offended? (Score:5, Insightful)
He would probably have laughed even if another man said that. Seriously, from intern to engineer in five years?
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bollocks. You made that answer up based on your own prejudices.
All of us, I'm sure, know of female software engineers, female tesaters, female BAs, female DBAs (more common than you think!) and woulnd't bat an eyelid if a woman "dared" say she wanetd a job in the industry like, well, like all the other millions of women who work in it.
What the guy did was unprofessional, and he was almost certainly a dick. But chances are he was laughing at an intern with no skills or flair for the job decideding she wanted
Re:Too easily offended? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, from intern to engineer in five years?
Most internships are between a student's junior and senior year. So if they finish their summer internship in August and graduate the following May, that is 9 months from intern to degreed engineer.
I can't imagine how it could possibly take 5 years. That is just silly. So I don't blame the interviewer for laughing.
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that is 9 months from intern to degreed engineer
What the shit is a "degreed engineer"? There's no such thing as a "software engineer" to begin with. There is zero rigor or regulation in the field. It is not a profession in any sense, and for 99.999% of them, there are no fucking engines involved.
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Not entirely true: https://www.nspe.org/resources... [nspe.org]
They had a PE starting back in 2013, but due to a lack of exam takers and virtually no regulation enforcement they discontinued it this year. Software engineer has also been a recognized term since the 90s, but it is very loosely regulated. I do agree however that there is a lack of regulation/enforcement of regulation and it shows in a lot of ways...
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Good grief, calm down bro... I got a degree in Computer Science and can do work as a software engineer, therefore I am a "degreed engineer."
As for engines being involved... Depends on how you define engine. Most serious software projects have many virtual "moving parts" to them and are even more complex than physical engines. We may not be moving physical stuff around, but we're certainly moving data around. The software that makes the Internet possible could easily be considered the "engine" that makes the
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Not sure what kind of a broken university program you are describing, but in most of Europe there are at least two years of classes between the junior and senior year, which means 3 summers and possible internships.
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4 years of college in the U.S., named: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.
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Re:Too easily offended? (Score:4, Insightful)
"What do you see yourself doing 5 years from now?" is a pretty common interview question. If you say you see yourself as a software engineer, that doesn't mean you think it'll take 5 years to move up. It means that's the job you'd like to have 5 years from now.
The question gets asked to see what career path someone intends to take. Some people will intend to stay in a similar position long term. Some people might see the job they're interviewing for as a way to get their foot in the door at the company before moving into a different role. Other people might have ambitions of moving up into higher level jobs. Which answer is the "right" answer depends on the company and the position.
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Junior-year internships are a thing. Let's start there.
Year 1: Starting junior year, doing internship.
Year 2: Senior year and doing a second internship, which is becoming more popular as more companies say they want experience in their entry-level hires.
Year 3: Degree acquired. Grinding job at a startup recruiting fresh innovative minds out of college.
Year 4: Startup folds. Maybe a Summer of Code or open-source project while working a minimum-wage job to make rent and repay an emergency loan from when the s
Re:Too easily offended? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that stuck out to me was that "More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience"
(emphasis mine). Network effects mean it wouldn't take very many people having a negative experience (or saying they had a negative experience) for half of people to know one.
Also, as a guy I've had pretty shitty experiences with interviews. I had a (female) head of HR at a company blatantly lie about just about everything I asked. Not much I could do about it when I accepted the job and found out all the things she'd misrepresented.
Re:Too easily offended? (Score:5, Interesting)
and - the summary menrioned "no indication of sexual harrassment or discrimination" - so this is not "woman got groped or asked if she fancied giving the interviewer a blowie in the server room", this is "they didn't fall over themselves to treat me with the kind of fawning respect I consider myself to deserve"
I have never, ever met a male head of HR though. Maybe we need some gender rebalance in that department more ;)
Bad study that could be showing something else. (Score:3)
From the PDF:
"They shared stories about implicit and explicit biases in interview processes—interviewers doubting their abilities, facing all-white male interview panels, feeling an overwhelming pressure to consider their appearance, being passed over for less qualified male candidates, even being the targets of unwanted advances by male recruiters."
Interview
What about other fields? (Score:5, Insightful)
> or observing a noticeable lack of diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the interview process.
Do male nurses have the same complaints too?
Or female fire fighters?
Or female construction workers?
What makes programming so special that we "must" have a 50/50 ratio ?
If companies are no longer hiring on merit but based on gender then that is just reverse discrimination.
Re: What about other fields? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: What about other fields? (Score:4, Insightful)
I had never seen it, until this year. (Texas) (Score:5, Insightful)
I had always kinda wondered about these things because I had seen anything like it; these reports probably aren't coming from thin air, I thought. Perhaps California is different and there really is a problem there?
> these somewhat-recent startups like Uber that seem to have no adults in charge anywhere
I've never worked in that kind of company. I could certainly imagine a lot of different problems might be prevalent with essentially frat guys in charge.
I had never seen it anywhere in Texas. Until very recently at one place you might not expect. The company has won several awards for diversity; paying attention to each and every "minority" demographic is super important in that company. Mostly the Women's Network runs the company, certainly all of the professional development opportunities.
The only people more important than someone with a vagina is someone who dresses opposite their gender. LGBTQ flyers and posters are EVERYWHERE. Every time you go to the bathroom, there is LGBTQ in your face. Want a cup of coffee? You're going to have one LGBTQ poster on the coffee cup dispenser and another on the coffee machine (literally). Two daily emails and devoted to diversity, as I recall. Gotta have your daily update on what percentage of the workforce has a vag, what percentage has a penis, what percentage is from India, what percentage is lesbian, etc. You can't work a day without having the stuff shoved in your face at least a dozen times. Gotta celebrate when they get rid of a man and replace him with someone who identifies as non-binary!
Perhaps not surprisingly, the employees spend a lot of time thinking about identify politics. I heard Hispanic people complaining about the Indian people, women jealous of the special treatment transvestites get, etc.
Pretty ridiculous, in my opinion. I never heard or saw the same kind of racist and sexist comments and "jokes" at any other place, any place that didn't make genitalia and complexion more important than work.
It didn't take long for me to quit working at CBRE. I stated I wouldn't sign on to engage in racist or sexist behavior, actively promoting promoting one race or gender above another. After I called obvious discrimination "discrimination", it was made very clear that calling a spade a spade is not welcome at the company. By federal law, their action is probably illegal "retaliation"; I have better things to do with my time than file suit.
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I've never seen such a poster, I've never seen any gay agenda or recruitment, and I have known and worked with gays and cross dressers. Maybe that's a Texas thing.
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I had always kinda wondered about these things because I had seen anything like it; these reports probably aren't coming from thin air, I thought. Perhaps California is different and there really is a problem there?
It's not just California. I think the problem is that they are usually weeded out long before you would encounter them. I know that there were always a lot of young and attractive females in the first year of computer science at my university. Most changed majors by the end of their first year. The guys (at least at my university) were very creepy and inappropriate around female students. Not in general ed classes, only in computer science classes. Only a couple would ever make it past their first yea
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several awards for diversity; paying attention to each and every "minority" demographic is super important in that company. Mostly the Women's Network runs the company
The company I work at right now always says it values diversity so much. I've noticed lately that all the charity effort seems to leave behind homeless, children, sick, etc more and more... Charity has been focusing more and more on diversity awareness. Money spent on Pride marches. Money spent on rainbow flags. Money spent on telling people how the LBGT people are so amazing. In the past few months I feel like I've seen 8 or 9 of those things promoted.... meanwhile I've only vaguely gotten lucky enou
Re: What about other fields? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't doubt that there is a certain element of how to wield power gracefully, and conduct yourself professionally, that would be much better learned climbing the ranks of an existing company than self-taught by high-school nerds living the post-college dream.
But one question: are you a woman?
Something I've had demonstrated to me on occasion is the pervasiveness of unwelcome behavior toward woman that I just don't notice without my attention being drawn to it. It's not something that it would ever benefit me to notice, and that lovely efficient brain of ours doesn't waste effort growing the circuitry to recognize such things. If you're a man, you might learn some very interesting things if there's a woman colleague that you would trust to give you her honest opinion of the overall state of such things in your company.
And if you don't have such a woman colleague, perhaps you should take that as an indicator that there really is a problem there. I imagine you have at least a few male colleagues you'd trust to answer the same question.
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Something I've had demonstrated to me on occasion is the pervasiveness of unwelcome behavior toward woman that I just don't notice without my attention being drawn to it.
Sounds like you're describing microaggressions, which is the art of interpreting/framing everyday comments and actions in a negative light. As a result, everyone who's learned about microaggressions gets to see themselves as a victim of oppression. In particular, people need to be trained in intersectional thinking (seeing multiple axes of privilege and oppression that intersect), and to spot microaggression. They then know how to score someone's level of privilege, identify distinct identity groups, see
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Sometimes everyday comments and actions ARE negative. I'm a guy, I know what guys are like, they are very often crude and boorish, just hang around in the showers at a gym and you'll see that. I'm not saying all men are, but there are easily 10% who just love to insult everyone, men and women alike, all races, and such, and they're very loud to say that they insult everyone equally as if it were all ok. But in my experience the insults from a guy to a guy is not an insult about being male it's more things
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they are very often crude and boorish
but there are easily 10% who just love to insult everyone
Sounds like you've never hung around women either.
Re: What about other fields? (Score:4, Interesting)
"we treat them the way we do". If you are treating fames badly - by all means change, but don't project your behavior on others.
I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. My parents are mechanical engineers, more specifically designers, they studied in the early 80s and their class makeup was about 45% female. I've been to their work places and there are some departments where there were 80% female. Heck even about 30% of the crane operators and welders were female. Talking about shipyards, coal and nuclear power plants and chemical plants here. Indeed in mines there were almost no women in the shafts, but practically all the administration and spedition was female, even those driving the forklifts.
My STEM high school in late 90s had about 55% female students. We studied programming, physics and chemistry. I think about 35% of the girls and about 60% of the boys went to IT companies (telecoms and software companies). In university - about 40% were female in our cohorts.
In my first job, out of 12 people in my department 7 were female.
In my second job, on my first team 50% were female, on my subsequent teams about 35% were female, depending on the country and team makeup:
Eastern Europe and France - about 50%, India - about 30%, Russia - about 20%, mixed expats in US - about 50%, monolithic (Indian) expats in US - about 30%. A citizen by birth team only in US - 0-5%. Mixed expat and citizen by birth team in US - 30-50%.
On my current team 50% are female. One is a recent community college graduate that shows all signs of a rockstar developer in the making. In 6 months if the senior guys decide to kick up their feet and go fishing for an extended period of time I am sure she will be able to step in completely.
In my experience in the places where the percentage is high people come to work to get job done, not to play politics. In US with citizens by birth - both sides play politics.
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> or observing a noticeable lack of diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the interview process.
Do male nurses have the same complaints too?
Or female fire fighters?
Or female construction workers?
What makes programming so special that we "must" have a 50/50 ratio ?
If companies are no longer hiring on merit but based on gender then that is just reverse discrimination.
I believe they are referring to this:
They described instances where a male interviewer flirted with them during the interview, sent an unsolicited photo of himself, asked if they had a significant other, or made sexual remarks in their presence. The respondents also reported feeling dismissed or demeaned because of their gender. One respondent was asked why she would want to go into tech as a woman; in another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw herself becoming a software engineer in five years.
Rather than a strict 50/50 ratio, and yes, there are reasons to believe the examples you gave suffer similarly.
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Perhaps because such a response would almost certainly guarantee they not get the job? There is a reason that making any overtures from a position of power is frowned on - it's far too easy for that power to be abused. Even if *you* would never do such a thing, enough men would that there's no way for her to be sure of that.
And perhaps because that would be a very confrontational "male" reaction - women are generally raised to be "nice", and "likeable", and slide the dagger in from the side if they decide
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But seriously, when you see questions like this and the one about hearing a co-worker claim to have been harassed makes it kind of obvious that this whole survey was set up with the express purpose of trying to shame the tech industry. Which is obviously par for the course seeing h
I didn't even have to look at the editor (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply seeing the title, I knew it was msmash.
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Simply seeing the title, I knew it was msmash.
Oh, c'mon, could have been AmiMojo.
"We play both kinds of music here; country, and western!"
Not only women have those experiences... (Score:5, Insightful)
More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience
That was true for me when I was doing internships out of college.
such as being subjected to gender-biased interview questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of diversity
See right there you have poisoned the results by mixing issues that are actually real problems (inappropriate remarks) with things that are possibly not the fault of the people you are interviewing with (lack of diversity, which they are trying demonstrably to address in part by interviewing a female).
So it's hard to say what level of problem we are really talking about here.
Also the region may well matter, it seems to me events like this are much more common in the Bay Area than other areas of the U.S. Perhaps we should direct women to think about looking for jobs elsewhere first to improve their experiences.
in another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw herself becoming a software engineer in five years.
This is terrible, but I honestly find it hard to believe someone like this exists at this point. Not to put to fine a point on it but how can we be sure some of these responses are not fabricated?
Re:Not only women have those experiences... (Score:5, Insightful)
in another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw herself becoming a software engineer in five years.
This is terrible, but I honestly find it hard to believe someone like this exists at this point. Not to put to fine a point on it but how can we be sure some of these responses are not fabricated?
And even if it wasn't, how do we know that the reaction was a reaction to the candidate's gender and not to the candidate's skills? I mean, it would be an inappropriate reaction for an interviewer either way, but we shouldn't assume bias merely because the interviewer was behaving like a jerk. He could just be a jerk. :-)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not only women have those experiences... (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone insults a terrible candidate during an interview, then there are two people in that room with problems that need fixing.
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He could just be a jerk.
Yeah. Because that's who I always send to interview people I might want to join the company - jerks. That's the ticket.
Let me give you a piece of management advice - don't hire jerks. Thank you.
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Every interviewer should take a class (Score:5, Interesting)
In Texas last 60 days I've had about 25 interviews.
It was clear that no one than about 5 of the interviewers had any training in interviewing, or had read a few "how to conduct interviews" articles. Interviewing well is a skill, or set of skills. You can gain some competency in an hour or so; nobody is born with the skill. If you're interviewing people, either you've received training or you need training.
Here's one thing I learned that helped me for interviewing programmers. I ask questions / have conversations to try to answer four questions. I take notes on each of these areas:
Technical skill - can they program? This type of programming? With these tools?
Aptitude - a car mechanic who is great at troubleshooting would score well here. A CS major who can't disassemble and reassemble a pen probably wouldn't.
Domain knowledge - do they know anything about what we do, the business? When programming security software, it helps to know something about security.
Teamwork - how do they work with a team? Do they handle disagreement well? Do they know when to ask for help and when to Google it for themselves?
Subjective fit - Do I want to work with them? Are they a good fit for the team? Some people are just assholes or annoying. *All else being equal*, there are some people I'd rather work with than others.
Of my last two interviews, the most recent covered ONLY aptitude - brainteasers to see how smart I was. The one before that covered ONLY programming skill. In either case, they didn't know to even think about 75% of what matters.
Re: Every interviewer should take a class (Score:2)
A quick tech screen is a great idea (Score:2)
That's absolutely a great idea. We call it a "tech screen".
When you do three interviews, all are purely technical programming skill, then offer me a rather nice salary without ever having a *conversation* with me, your interview process could use improvement. They never gave themselves a chance to discover that I'm an asshole.
I did develop a counter to that, just recently. I started going into interviews with my *own* opening prepared, not waiting for them to ask the questions they just copy/pasted from
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It's certainly a good policy, but the bigger the company, the more likely it is that a few will slip in there. :-D
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I'm sure you mean well, but directing women away from the area where they have the best career opportunities is very harmful.
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I'm sure you meant well, but thinking that working for toxic Bay Area companies will present women with the best career opportunities is very harmful.
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Maybe the interviewer was attempting to ascertain how the intern would react to stress.
“Not to put to fine a point on it but how can we be sure some of these responses a
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Not to put to fine a point on it but how can we be sure some of these responses are not fabricated?
I bet most were. The girls who code group is a ton of activists who would not be against fabricating garbage to get victim points.
Where is proof that sexism is prevalent? (Score:2)
Yeah, youÃ(TM)re right, the sensible first response to Ãoehey, sexism is kinda prevalent
They study didn't show sexism was prevalent (as I noted).
I personally have not seen that sexism is prevalent in programming, I have worked with a lot of women in a lot of companies and helped interview a lot of women as well, all without any of the issues listed.
I'm not saying there is no sexism present, obviously there probably still is (especially in California), but I see no evidence sexism is "prevalent".
In
Some bad, some perception (Score:3)
One of the articles references some experiences that just sound like crappy interviewers, of which I've had my share. I wrote a whole company off because of one. They obviously didn't have their act together and were totally disinterested the entire phone screen.
As the subject of the article points out, they felt like the interviewer snapped at them. Yeah, maybe he was being dismissive of her gender, or maybe he was just a jerk in general. But on the other hand, flirting with interview candidates, sending unsolicitied pics, asking why you would want to go into tech as a women, etc, that stuff is not okay.
Really? (Score:2)
Interns are treated like shit (Score:2)
I've seen interns being treated so unfairly, because they are not employees they are given horrible busy work, degrading work.
How much of the bad bosses is it gender related, or just normal abuse?
And even in larger fortune 500 companies, we have had tons of women interns, they got treated the same as men, the bosses dumped on them too.
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It's a common catchphrase in the workplace to say, "I don't wanna do this grunt task, are there any interns we can dump it on?"
It's sort of the view that "everyone has to start in the mail-room". (Do those exist anymore?)
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It's sort of the view that "everyone has to start in the mail-room". (Do those exist anymore?)
In the modern workplace, the "mail room" is the server room, and yes, there are a lot of servers, especially mail servers, that need to be wiped on a regular basis. You know, they get pretty dusty.
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There are still mail rooms, especially for companies that handle checks and need equipment delivered reliably. But most of that is now the Exchange server, or the Office365 administrator. Much of that is, in fact, work well suited to an intern learning the ins and outs. of the systems. The good ones learn LDAP and account security in the process, and come speak with _me_ about the details of how SMTP works and the trade-offs between keeping every email, and flushing old logs to avoid being sued for them.
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No offence but if you had to start in the "mail room" you suck as a programmer.
Whoosh. Yes, I think the person I had in mind when making that comment probably does suck as a programmer.
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Why would you have the $150+/hr a person pulling analysis memos when you have a $20/hr intern who is more than capable and can learn plenty in doing so, around here we actually pay them. Anyone who doesn't pay them should be put out of business in my opinion.
Yes, there's some grunt that nobody wants to do given to them. But they also learn a fuck ton. What do you expect them to do, start designing flight hardware and software? We have a hard enough time finding people who are newly graduated to come in and
Re: Interns are treated like shit (Score:2)
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It's a common catchphrase in the workplace to say, "I don't wanna do this grunt task, are there any interns we can dump it on?"
It's sort of the view that "everyone has to start in the mail-room". (Do those exist anymore?)
Mail rooms exist. Pepe Silvia does not.
Re:Interns are treated like shit (Score:4, Interesting)
This happens everywhere, since forever. Apprentices get the shit boring repetitive work. It's a rite of passage. But hey, lets give the guy who doesn't know how to code (but thinks he does) the most important job. Lets give the guy the task to hunt down a major system bug in a system he has no fucking clue about. Interns are given shit tasks until they can prove they can handle more, because you have to do something with them. I guarantee you this much, if an intern shows promise and performs well they will be given more demanding tasks and more responsibility. Or did you think an intern would land a major software role after their crash course in software programming in varsity? One of my major pet peeves is teaching interns, I hate it. They all think they can code, but they know the bare basics, the hardest part is not the teaching part, it's beating the fact that they think a thousand line program is BIG out of their heads. Don't get me started on programming standards.
Well, with that attitude... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you go in to help solve the problem of too little diversity, and before you even start to contribute you're already offended that it hasn't been solved already. We're not going to solve the problem by going into STEM, we're going to study "gender studies" instead, and then complain that so few girls choose for a career in STEM... Yeah, I thought I recognised the tune from somewhere.
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Ok ... (Score:3)
Aren't these all possible or actual HR violations? There's a clear corporate redress for this, and if you don't/won't submit candidate complaints into the corporate immune system, what makes you think you can handle processes for other distasteful situations in any corporation?
Seriously, all of this sounds like an HR rep would be screaming "liability" considering the interviewee has nothing to lose by going anonymously public with their concerns, while HR probably can't reveal the interviewee's name while trying to pre-emptively protect their corporation's reputation.
That was my thought (Score:2)
There are subtle things that interviewers/supervisors can do that make women feel inferior but the examples cited were pretty blatant and should be reportable.
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Aren't these all possible or actual HR violations?
Yes.
There's a clear corporate redress for this, and if you don't/won't submit candidate complaints into the corporate immune system, what makes you think you can handle processes for other distasteful situations in any corporation?
Well, they'd probably like to actually work in the field in the future. And reporting anything to HR makes that much harder.
Yes, there are laws against retaliation. Guess what is almost impossible to prove in court? And guess what action requires a public record that makes you almost un-employable, even if you win?
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Believe it or not, it's possible for one company's HR to talk to another company's HR.
Re: Ok ... (Score:2)
Isn't HR heavily dominated by women these days?
Re: Ok ... (Score:2)
I've never met an HR commisar who wasn't either female or flamingly gay. Seems they have a diversity problem there too...
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1) Maybe they are lying
2) Maybe they are dealing with regular intern BS and there is no bad intent.
3) Maybe they are dealing with a non-sexist jerk
4) If they are actually dealing with a sexist jerk, they should have the savvy and courage to report it to HR.
5) What they are describing doesn't sound that bad, and why aren't there more heterosexual male fashion designers?
There is hostility even to the idea that women might be experiencing hostility!
Good job
Cliques (Score:2)
the iron law of stochastic process (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, honey, that does not count as a negative experience. There's enough bad behaviour to justify your sour expression without appeal to the false logic of a micro-diversity police state (parsed all the way down to every group of people in every room).
The first course of hiring in any technology startup is to hire the people you know best, through your direct personal network. If your primary social sphere was your college D&D club, then your company is not likely to become a uniform cross-section of greater society any time soon. (All the hot girls were probably invited, but chose not to show up. Note that for this group, "hot" is pretty much all-inclusive, so long as the invitee sheds the Louis Vuitton.)
Hiring mainly from the great, uniform void comes much later, once the company is too large to place primary reliance on shaking its internal social network. Even so, any initial non-uniformity will persist at the highest management levels for half a human lifespan.
What part of how professional social networks function do SJWs not get?
Skill testing whiteboard question: given social process X, will composition of set Y tend to uniformly converge to the distributional structure of background set Z, and if so, over what reasonable time frame?
Either the candidate passes this question pertaining to the mathematical structure of graph-based stochastic processes or the candidate can feel sour about the composition of the hiring panel, but not both.
So where's the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Take a second to have a look what has actually been measured here:
"50% have experienced or know someone who has experienced..."
If we asume that a female in thus survey does know only 9 other females, then a 1 in 10 ratio will be counted in the actual result. In other words: If 50% know someone (out of their 10 possible friends) that means that only 5% had a bad experience when applying for a tech job. But still results in 50 horror interview reports per 100 people asked. Even less if the subjects know more than 10 other female tech students and even much less if several subjects know the same person who had a bad experience.
And what does count as a "bad experience"? Interviewing in a "non diverse" company? Really?
So with that x10 amplification in the survey design: Could be much worse. Like 10% of my job interviews as a male were horrible experiences.
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Hailed? (Score:2)
I look forward to the calm, rational debate (Score:2)
Social issue studies are poorly designed (Score:2)
These things happen in both directions for any gender. The article makes it quite clear they had to cut the data very much into shape to get the desired results - let's cut 50% of our study population and then cut all other professions and all age groups we don't want represented.
Some people are truly bad, some people are jerks but most are just ignorant. I've had plenty of questions about my love life and marital status at work, even in power dynamics, most if not all of the times it's just small talk. I'v
half had been or knew ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, ok, sure. (Score:2)
Interns and toxic interviews? (Score:5, Insightful)
I question the provenance of this "study" and the presented anecdotes. Was there any actual hard evidence or companies named by the respondents. Some time back there were complaints about code submitted to GitHub about female coders being judged more harshly than code submitted by males. The opposite turned out to be the case, as when the moderators were aware of the gender of the submitter, they gave the female code better grades. There is no gender gap in computing. Most males like to work with things, while most females like to engage in the social sphere. It's to do with three hundred thousand years of evolution. Bring this kind of toxic feminism into your organization will be the ruin of it. Just look what diversity did for Google.
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I've heard this kind of shit towards women in my workplace though, and two guys over 6 years were fired because they just couldn't shut off their stupid valve when it came to talking to women. So I believe it
Oh, come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of idiots are they getting to do these interviews? I am about the furthest thing you can get from a Social Justice warrior, I am a middle-aged white guy, probably "on the spectrum" - but this sort of stuff is completely immature and unprofessional behavior. It would have been considered immature and unprofessional 35-40 years ago. And would certainly have gotten almost anyone doing it at least a pretty good talking to and a few days suspension, if not fired outright.
Inappropriate sexual comments - *to an intern*? I am walking you out *that afternoon*, you are off the access list. HR can figure out what to do with you later, but you aren't coming back in my area.
At the very least, if you are this big a jackass, you should know to avoid stuff to avoid getting in trouble, even if you don't understand the concept of common decency.
It sounds like these companies don't have a diversity problem, they have an *idiot problem*.
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You're only permitted to abuse the interns if you are very popular with the Democratic party. I'm thinking particularly of President Clinton who somehow was politically forgiven his flagrant abuses of interns and campaign staff members.
Double count (Score:3)
half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience
That seems at risk of double counting "another woman" known by multiple respondent.
"Toxic" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Toxic" is a meaningless word in this context. It just means "something I don't like".
By lumping together truly bad stuff, like interviewers hitting on them, with "seeing a noticeable lack of diversity", it renders this meaningless.
Of course ... (Score:4, Insightful)
They designed the question such that everybody would agree.
Itâ(TM)s like when my employer was trying to up itâ(TM)s âoedisabledâ count to get some government contract. They encouraged people to self-select as disabled if they âoeever, at any point in their life, had a condition or illness that limited them from usual pursuits in any way.â They stressed that it didnâ(TM)t need to be current.
Basically, if anyone had ever had the common cold, they we encouraged to identify themselves as disabled.
Similarly, if all you need to be oppressed is to know someone that had a bad interview experience ... dare I say that every single person on this forum, or who has ever posted to this forum, has been the victim of a âoetoxicâ interview process.
BTW, much like âoeamazingâ, itâ(TM)s nice to see how the word âoetoxicâ has now been overused into irrelevance as well. It almost feels like weâ(TM)re starting to run out of words to bastardize.
Really basic logic problem with this report (Score:2)
Which is why they are interviewing you. You can be Diversity.
NULL (Score:2)
Lack of Diversity (Score:2)
#fakenews (Score:2)
When I started my career in the 90s, there we plenty of women in both a startup and a big company where I worked. Predominantly Asian, because programming was not hip back then and reserved for nerds and children of tiger moms. In any case, nobody questioned that both genders can be in tech for whatever reason. If it became worse 1/3rd century later, it must be that SJWs are the ones who are really sexist and racist. They should then get some help and lay their Freudian projections off the rest of us.
Doesn't everyone have a shitty interview story? (Score:3)
Unless you were handed your job on a silver platter. Those of us who had to beat the bushes for leads and chase down any hint of opportunity to finally land an entry level job that could be evolved into a career over some years generally had at least a couple shitty interviews conducted by shitty people that left us wondering why they are pretending they want to hire someone.
I think the likely explanation is that the interviewer has the job lined up for someone already and has no intention of hiring you but, for whatever reason, feels they have to go thru the interviewing motions with you.
Job interviews are stressful, especially the first (Score:3)
Job interviews are stressful, especially if you haven't done them before. You worry a lot about how you look. You often feel intimidated. You often face hard questions from people who have no reason to believe or respect you, and it's your job to prove they should.
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Re: IDK, as a M2F transgender, I find it fun... (Score:2)
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Simply seeing the title, I knew it was msmash
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Found the Russian
You forgot the sarcasm tag. If you didn't, you are the problem. Someone disagrees with you and your default response is that they are a Russian troll, or a racist, or whatever pejorative tag you use to slime others then nothing you say has any value. If your default response is always Defcon 1 (the lower the number, the higher the seriousness) then nothing you say will be taken seriously. Impactfulness only comes from a difference in your response. If you are always polite and then tell someone to fuck
Re: IDK, as a M2F transgender, I find it fun... (Score:2)
Re: Women (Score:2)
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Yeah, and so has this Comfort Women
It's a fucking stupid idea, how about using your intellect instead of prostituting yourselves.
Whenever you bargain with something it becomes a commodity, if you are bargaining with sex, it makes you a prostitute.
Make no mistake, I have no issue with traders, I have issue with people who lie about the fact that they are trading.
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