I had come across that study/story before, and consider it one of the great successes in combating discrimination that I have ever heard!

Blinding the auditions is brilliant, because it isn't a "bias for bias" approach. It doesn't attempt to combat one bias by intentionally introducing another bias. It just removes the jury's ability to be biased, by concealing the musician's sex.

Because of this, the results of that study are nearly unimpeachable. It's basically a perfect approach. If tech could do anything comparable to that, I would be 100% in favor.

I believe they could! With all that technology? Shoot. All we had was a stage and a screen to work with. I will say that in another study it was found that the sound of women's dress shoes unconsciously biased juries. So we all (even men) walk to the stage on a carpet strip to mute that sound, or we play in stocking feet or soft shoes. Taking the screen away at the end is its only flaw. I will say something that a lot of non musicians may not realize, though. If you know a player (we all have known one another from childhood, in many cases) you can pick him/her out of 100 players just like you recognize someone's voice on the phone. So, there is always that bias. So, not 100% perfect, but better. If the conductor/principal player knows you and likes you...it helps...a lot.(and they are fairly likely to know you, at least) It doesn't matter what instrument they are playing either. I could recognize any player's playing I know by their kazoo playing, just like you can instantly hear the difference between Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. Players whose playing is nondescript don't make it to the level of taking an orchestral audition, even poorly. I'm curious, is code at the highest levels the same? I'm not an accomplished enough programmer to know this. That would be an interesting difference between coding and playing music, but I suspect you could recognize a great programmer's coding style.

Why aren't there totally blind coding interviews? I just don't get it! The science (I've read but can't remember the source now- if you know it, please share) says that in-person interviews are not helpful in helping to identify successful candidates, and are often harmful.

You might find this interesting, then. A company that does remote technical interviews as a service tried altering the pitches of interview candidates' voices through software, so they could change whether they sounded male or female, and looked at the effect it had on how the interviewers judged their performance.

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

"After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected..."

Yes, thank you for brining this up, sincerely. I'd read about this too. Even though it isn't statistically significant, it is a fascinating result. This study should be performed again while collecting more precise data on a bigger swath of engineers.

I can't speak to anything related to interviewing because I don't do interviews. Part of the reason I don't do interviews is because I have very low confidence in my ability to quickly tell who is good. Most of my colleagues that I respect the most (I work at Google) didn't make a strong impression on me when I first met them, or even within a few days. I feel like it takes days or weeks for me to get a sense of how much I like someone's work. So I definitely feel unsatisfied with the interviewing approach in general, but I don't have any practical ideas about how to improve it. "Work with someone for days or weeks first" isn't practical.

I get your point that there still could be biases if you can recognize a musician's sound. I should have been more clear about what I meant by "perfect". What I meant is just that this intervention (adding screens to auditions) almost certainly didn't create any bias, it only removed it. It may not have removed 100% of it, but it didn't combat the bias by introducing a counter-bias.

Can you recognize a coder's work by their style? Definitely to some extent. One aspect of working on a shared code-base with a whole bunch of engineers is that uniformity of style is a significant plus (makes code easier to read when it's consistent), so many of the differences that might show a "personal flare" are removed. But still, there is plenty that could belie a person's coding style.

I think there are way too many programmers out there, however, for this to be an issue in interviews. Estimates say there are something like 2-4 million software engineers in the US. Compare this with orchestral musicians: it looks like about 60 orchestras in the US work 40+ weeks per year; if we estimate 100 players per orchestra this is 6,000 full-time orchestra spots in the USA (you might have better numbers on this). If you specialize this by instrument, it might be more like 240 full-time orchestral oboists in the whole country. It seems much more likely that you could recognize a specific person with those odds.

(By the way, I'm a musician too. :) Though not in the orchestral world, and not full-time. I'm a singer (small ensembles mainly), though I did a lot of collaborations with orchestras as a boy growing up in Boychoir).

Hey, thanks for responding with such interesting information! I had a friend audition for a swe job at Google. (very very small sample size, I know) They had a wonderful audition experience, even though they didn't get the job.

I understood/agree with you about how you spoke about our audition removing bias without introducing a counter-bias. There is no way to be perfect here, but the orchestras who implement this screened protocol are some of the top 10 in the country, and are respected throughout classical music for making the best attempts to be fair. (most orchestras do a sloppier version of the screen, and small orchestras don't bother) After I got wise to it, I only took "top 10" auditions for this reason, because the process is an expensive burden on the player.

You are right-ish about the numbers of players in circulation. This is an interesting point about why we or our colleagues know who is playing behind the screen: 1. we know who's at the audition. 2. At any given point, there are around 20-30 of us in the group of around 200-250 per instrument (who might all show up to a top 10-er) who are "in it to win it" at a top-ten audition. We all play gigs together often or went to school with one another. So the group we are selecting from is very small. Still, I believe we each could do it out of 100 players. It would be instructive to test this. I only mentioned it because it is interesting and most people don't realize this. (people are surprised when a musician can identify who is playing on a Mozart Concerto recording within a few bars at parties, but it isn't a trick-- your ear gets trained to recognize people in that way.)

I only asked about recognizing someone by their code because there is a scene in Silicon Valley where Dinesh "falls in love" with the code of Guilfoyle, without knowing it's his. I thought that was hilarious, but unlikely, since the characters code together every day. Your comment taught me something about how teams work together on code. I'd say it is like the "house style" of a newspaper.

I agree that it would be unlikely for anyone to recognize someone's code in a blind coding interview due to the numbers of engineers out there. Very interesting comment. Thank you! Cool that you are a singer and can keep it up.

>>We could have an even higher percentage of women, like we do in many top-notch classical outfits today.

There is a difference between succeeding in difficult tasks and succeeding at tasks that are seeing very high growth in overall accumulation of knowledge.

In high growth areas its not easy to make it big without working insane hours. Or return to regular practice after long breaks.

To me tech will will see near equal representation over time. As our trade becomes normal like any other. Of course that will mean the high intensity action will move onto else where.

Can you clarify what you mean here? (not trying to be cheeky, but I'm just not grasping) What is the difference between a difficult task and a task that sees high growth in accumulation of knowledge? In terms of the classical orchestral musician/swe analogy I don't see what you are driving at.

>In high growth areas its not easy to make it big without working insane hours.

In classical music (and jazz etc.), you can't succeed at even a prosaic task such as winning an orchestra audition without working life-destroying hours. From age 10(or earlier, really) to age 40+, most classical musicians who "succeed" practice alone at least 4hrs a day, and rehearse, perform (and teach, when they are older) another another 4-6 hrs per day. There really isn't room for anything but this in their lives. That is the info I can offer to help w understanding this half of what you are saying. I think I didn't realize that this was not widely known. Coming from this life, it is easy to lose perspective on what is generally understood.

The difference is between usable and reusable knowledge.

If every few years you have to throw away a good part of what your learned and redo it, taking big breaks becomes very hard.

You can do this in music because you start exactly where you stopped. In programming we haven't yet reached a state where knowledge of tools, frameworks and ecosystem can remain the same for years. Things change pretty rapidly here.

It may surprise you to know that musicians can't take even a few months' long break without suffering professionally. Remaining in shape for an audition only lasts until the last few days before that particular audition. If you stop practicing for a few months, it takes at least that long to get back into shape. It is a lot like a professional sport that way. Illnesses are career killers, for example. Also, we have new repertoire coming in all the time by new composers-- whole new concertos to learn, new techniques to be hip to, new gear to learn... I can understand that it might look somehow different from the outside, but this is why a musician can't keep doing auditons forever. First, it is expensive and we don't get corporate sponsors like athletes do. It depends on perfect health, and many can't afford to maintain that without a benefactor. It also takes up every minute of your life to stay audition ready for job auditions and jobs themselves--no one can sustain that kind of mental,physical, and psychological stress for too long. But, while we can, men and women seem to handle these pressures equally well.

There's a level of navel gazing in large swathes of the startup community that assumes that no one else works as hard or needs as much knowledge.