There does not exist some magical undiscovered pool of talented female engineers that are being turned away by biased recruiters. It's hard enough to find any sort of talented engineers regardless of other factors. Shit, it's not uncommon to recruit from other countries and cover relocation costs these days.

Please note there is no active discrimination against men, but preference in some cases would be to hire a women. Gender is the only criteria for diversity in here.

Would a preference for hiring men be discrimination against women?

How exactly do you hire for female candidates without discriminating against the "overwhelming" body of male applicants? I would be really interested to know how this goes on behind the scenes: do you have open positions but cherry pick female candidates while disregarding male candidates from the get-go?

How is this not sexism? Replace female with male in the above quote and tell me it isnt sexist.

So yes, sexism is not symmetric. Same with race.

Amazon (and a lot of other big non-diverse companies) are therefore hoping what is actually happening is that they are the women's first choice already, but turn them down for some reason, and that they would not have to change a thing about their work process to attract more women, except to start seeing them.

It's obvious why companies like thinking that way, and it's possible to some extent it's true. However, the fact is, if they're playing like this it's a zero-sum game and it is not actually going to improve the diversity numbers.

On my part, I've been wondering. If all these companies want to know where the women who can code are... why not just ask them? Why do you never see a "Female Programmer's Career Survey" with questions such as "On average, over the last ten years, how long have you been looking for a job?" "Would you accept a new job for a $5k raise?" "Have you ever dropped out of a hiring process because of sexism?" Take it out there in the open. Ask the real questions.

Progamming is also manufactured to be a "male" profession. It used to be that researchers were males, and programming was considered womans work, like doing data entry. When companies like IBM discovered that the best programmers tended to be anti-social males, and that females tended to leave careers earlier to start a family, big tech companies focused all their recruitment on males until progamming became a "male" job. It's similar to how light beer used to be considered a womans drink, but beer companies started running ads showing football players and other masculine figures drinking it, and now it's acceptable for anyone to drink.

Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is.

It's not unlikely that most women don't want to be in software. Most men don't want to be in software! But hundreds of thousands of women are, in fact, working as programmers. Whenever tech news talks about hiring women, presumably, they're talking about hiring these women. Why pretend they don't exist?

That idea is complete poison. In a debate where you're both completely uninformed, the anecdotal evidence of experience is relevant. In any discussion where reason, numbers, research are involved, the gender/race of the person making the argument is irrelevant to the argument. This current idea that only women can talk about female issues, only X about X is pre-enlightenment tribalism.

It presupposes conflict between the tribes too. If in my philosophy I believe that through reason and evidence I can understand your point of view and experiences,there's the possibility of agreement. If you really believe that I can never talk about issues affecting your tribe, or arrive at reason to an underlying truth, there's no point in talking. We might as well just fight to see whose tribe can impose power on whose.

Arguments being inflammatory does not make them invalid. It is fine to have conversations that include inflammatory arguments, if they are made politely, which parent did. But ignoring that the argument is inflammatory, and/or that the group the argument refers to are in fact intelligent people involved in the discussion that may have themselves an opinion, is lacking in empathy. Rhetoric is founded in empathy; that is why it is an art, and not merely a technique.

woah what? no that is not at all what he's saying. If someone tells me "most american men like the NFL" and I don't like the NFL, I would be insane to take that as someone telling me "you're not a real man" and think they're trying to "tell me what a real man is." I can see how someone who is perpetually trying to be a victim might take such a hardline stance, though.

The conversational equivalent using the NFL example would go something like this:

"Why are there no Americans at my favorite chess forum?"

"Americans like the NFL. They're just more into brute force and camaraderie, especially American men. Chess can't really appeal to them. I mean, back in the Neolithic, a modern day chess grandmaster, if he managed to not burn in the sun and see an angry cougar 15 meters away, would probably have died. American men are just closer to their nature. I have this cousin who's American, I have attempted for years to get him to play chess and no dice. Not during the season, anyway."

"I mean sure but there are American chess clubs? Some Americans like chess? Surely the cougar thing is not relevant to my original scope?"

Now, you're a chess loving American. You're not at the first poster's forum because you can't be on all the forums in the world, and it's true love of chess is not exactly common in the US. However, how would you feel reading the description of how apparently literally everyone else in America loves the NFL? Would you feel proud to be American? Would you feel like the poster who made the NFL comment is likely to be an American man? Would you be more, or less likely to read his further arguments on different or related topics, for example, his opinion on American politics?

While I'm sure that there are plenty of women who don't mind those arguments being made, and I think to an extent this forum would select for those women anyway, it remains an argument that is, in essence, 1) prone to being misinterpreted and 2) a little blind to your audience. (the subject is chess - you are talking to a chess fan - for all you know the chess fan also loves the NFL)

And those arguments are less effective than other arguments, for example, the kinds that 1) don't make assumptions of their audience and 2) are closely related to the topic.

(I realise this digression itself is totally off-topic and I'm sorry. I'm not interested in monologuing or haranguing the poster or anything. I hope it, and the little NFL parable, showed you and the people who usually make that argument without thinking about who reads it, a slightly different side, and that you may consider it if in the future you should have longer debates on relevant subjects with people whose opinion and background you don't know a priori. And thank you to anyone who read it.)

Let me play the same game: I know a black guy who is president. Does that mean all black men are political? What about the one who just wants to play sports. Will we now call him an athletic black man, instead of just a black man...

You can generate endless arguments like this depending on your choice of anecdote and label.

Dirlewanger: group X have property Y arandr0x: members of group X without property Y might be offended by "group X have property Y" courir: as a member of group X without property Y I'm not offended by "most members of group X have property Y" arandr0x: <a reiteration of the previous comment> ramblerman: <rhetorically> does saying a member of group X has property Y mean all members of group X have property Y?

I think you (ramblerman) have logically inverted the main claim, which is why it doesn't seem to make sense. Behaviour in line with arandr0x' comment seems perfectly reasonable to me - few people take well to poorly fitting generalisations.

But nobody has ever said that. They say that women are more likely to be.

Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.

That's not true. Firstly, it's more like 40-50 years ago.

Secondly, there are far more women doing software development, but the gender ratio is dramatically different.

Thirdly, that's because male interest exploded with the advent of personal computing the 80s.

Lastly, "programming" as a profession used to be regarded as an offshot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women.

The facts around women in STEM are polluted with a lot of bizarre narratives.

"'programming' as a profession used to be regarded as an offshoot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women". Which begs the question of why women dominated secretarial work (and still do), while as programming became a more respected and better paying profession, it became male-dominated.

It really doesn't. Unless you seriously think punch card programming is the same as modern programming, or that the fact that only women were secretaries that did programming somehow provides data on the relative strengths and inclinations of women and men for programming work at that time.

Look, it's clear that you have no idea of the breadth and depth of data available on this subject, and a trite "sexism/oppression" narrative explains hardly any of it. For instance, the fact that as a nation becomes more egalitarian, the gender disparities in STEM increase, ie. Nordic countries have worse gender disparities than here, despite having less sexism, and oppressive countries like Iran actually have gender parity in STEM fields.

If you want to actually learn about this subject, I suggest reading: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...

The fact is, there's good evidence that women are naturally less interested in STEM-like fields due to a well known psychological attitude on things vs. people. That attitude explains facts like why medicine and law have achieved approximate gender parity overall, but surgery is still dominated by men, pediatrics and family law is dominated by women.

I do find it interesting and noteworthy that gender disparities have grown in STEM while shrinking in other fields. But I believe my explanation accounts for that - that STEM has become more prestigious, which draws men, which forces out women.

The "well known psychological attitude" is begging the question, which seems par for the course on responses here. Is this psychological attitude biological, or social? And if it's biological, how do we explain significant changes in professional proportions that have happened over a mere one or two generations? It seems like a very poor explanation for what you're asserting, contradicting your own stated facts.

If it's social, however, we're back to my explanation - as the prestige of formerly female-dominated careers rises, they become more attractive to men, to the point where men dominate them. It's a much simpler explanation, with no contradictions.

Because you're throwing out wild, unsupported speculation to salvage your narrative, and the original post of yours to which I replied had at least 4 elementary factual errors.

> But I believe my explanation accounts for that - that STEM has become more prestigious, which draws men, which forces out women.

That's not an explanation at all. Why would prestige drive away women? Just because there are men there? Or you think men drawn to prestige don't want women around? Or you think men just flood into any field that has some form of prestige thus drowning out women? So then why aren't the careers they left suddenly dominated by women because all the men left for more prestige? And where are all these men coming from since we have rough equal numbers of men and women? Why are janitors and dangerous jobs dominated by men since those aren't prestigious?

The fact that you think this explains anything or is free of contradictions is frankly bizarre, and just reinforces my point that if you're really interested in this field, you need to more read more and speculate less.

> The "well known psychological attitude" is begging the question, which seems par for the course on responses here. Is this psychological attitude biological, or social?

Likely both, since there's plenty of evidence of things vs. people in toddlers, and this innate preference no doubt gets reinforced and magnified.

In the end, your scoffing at the original poster and "subtly" implying that he's sexist for a remark that is actually well grounded in facts is exactly the problem with debating people on this subject.

Yes, there is sexism in STEM, just like there is in most other fields, but sexism didn't keep women out of medicine or law, they just pushed through and staked their claim. The fact that women haven't done this for STEM which is far less of an old boys' club already suggests something else is at play, and the fact that the same trends are seen across disparate cultures already suggests strongly there's a universal component.

I do think there's a universal component, though, as sexism is seen across virtually all cultures.

You're equivocating. You know very well that the type of sexism that kept women from working in virtually all professions, including law and medicine, is not the type of sexism we're discussing now.

Have you noticed how this is inconsistent with your prestige argument?

Is it competition that is forcing women out, or men ?

> as the prestige of formerly female-dominated careers rises, they become more attractive to men, to the point where men dominate them

What do you mean by dominated, is it the number of people, or is it something else ?

Are you trying to say that once a career path becomes female dominated, men should stay out ?

If tomorrow we say that you have to do 30 chinups to be a waitress, and the job will involve regular fistfights then we count the number of waitresses by gender and say "it must be cultural", we're kind of missing the point. Or if we say "OK now waitresses make 200k and are respected" and watch the numbers shift.

What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.

Not the parent and I wasn't around either, but I think accessibility of education counters your point, not supports it.

More egalitarianism should in theory be more favorable to women.

Back then I imagine it was much harder to program without access to university computers and education materials.

More women get higher education than men compared to 35 years ago.

More incentives (monetary and otherwise), combined with lower barriers to entry should also be favoring the supposedly disadvantaged.

And yet the drop in F-M ratio since late 1980s has not been overcome last time I checked.

If you assume that there are underlying differences in interests and aptitude, more egalitarianism allows these differences to be expressed more since women are more free to eg. choose a career working with people, like medicine or law. http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl... It also raises the bar for inherent aptitude to get into/(the top of) a career, since you're competing against a much wider pool of talent.

The point I was making to the parent was that his point "cross-generation drop in ratio proves it's cultural" doesn't hold up, because there have been many changes across those generations, you're comparing apples to oranges.

I first learned to program 35 years ago. It wasn't fundamentally different then. Hell, we still use programming languages that were in wide use 35 years ago, like C and the unix shell. The kind of thinking required hasn't changed.

So, based on my 35 years of experience, the conditions and the job are basically the same. So again, I challenge you - how is the job different now?

how is the job different? The pay is much higher and so are the entry requirements, that's the biggest difference. You don't get assigned to program punch cards as part of your secretarial role, you have to actively get educated and good to choose it as a career.

I think there's far more places now expecting crazy hours but that's anecdotal I don't have numbers on it. But the languages are different (mostly), the tooling is different, the deployment is different, the scale is different.

One very likely explanation is that many women who wanted to be independently financially successful had few choices other than tech back decades ago. Now they have many other choices.

But are they really ?, do you have any data/reference to back it up, I was under the assumption that there are more people, both men and women, working as programmers, than 30 years ago.

My father got me into programming, and my colleagues who are women also have a backstory with someone supporting their interest in development.

Just teach kids to code, boy or girl. Not all of them will like it, not all of them will be good at it. But I think a lot more girls would be into it and good at it if they were introduced to it before college.

Tailor it to the kid's interests. My first programs were more socially oriented. When I was 5-6 years old, all my programs were made-up conversations with the computer, where your answers were stored and parroted back by the computer to show that it was "listening". Maybe a boy would have been less into that and more into something mathier, like LOGO instead of BASIC, but it was what was interesting to me at that age. The computer was a form of imaginary friend for an introverted kid like me.

This hits home so hard.

And, yes, Bay Area tech hiring is needlessly hostile for men over a certain age as well.

I guess most men have thick skin or got lucky, so they don't see that, instead they think it's this dream job and everyone should partake in its wonderfulness.

I believe that the lack of women in tech is explained by societal bias against women and the nature of the job.

I think the recruiting team at my company would very much be interested in speaking with you.

One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions. There are many great engineers I've worked with who didn't do a CS degree, and even though they are brilliant thinkers and talented engineers, too many times the interview question is "solve this problem using <pet CS 101 lesson, like red-black trees>".

And the number of people who are hired who can barely communicate effectively is still shocking. Very few interview questions focus on communication outside the technical realm.

So you can argue there is a bias in recruiting, simply because different people have different criteria for what the best traits/skills to look for is - even though everybody has the same goal, hiring the "best".

I'd also caution about taking Reuters too seriously though. Seems that they've only focused on the gender issue, but this is the money quote:

> With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.

No. If you go down that path, then you are implying that women do in fact perform worse at CS-related questions. That's a much bigger can of worms than the bias being implicated here.

Sometimes, they seem more like a secret handshake you need to memorize to get into the boys club than actually useful engineering. Who hasn't had to revise some of these before applying for a job 3 years out of college?

What it does do is effectively exclude applicants who didn't study CS, or who haven't heard of and memorized "cracking the coding interview".

Assuming `fake CS questions == good engineer` is a huge mistake, but one i keep getting downvoted for everytime i mention it. Most rebuttals are usually something like "it's the best system we have", something i find unsatisfying.

While I understand that using IQ tests as hiring predictors is itself a problem, I'm interested in the interplay in predictive ability between the two classes of tests. I think everyone would agree that any primarily intellectual timed test that was _less_ salient to work performance than an IQ test should be binned. What would happen to our interviews then?

These interview processes exist sure, and I personally find them idiotic, but is there evidence that they disqualify women more than men?

After we moved to a logic-based test, we were able to hire several more women from interesting disciplines including psychology, math, and biology. The tests involved technical problems written in a general way. For example, thread scheduling was written to instead involving painters, rooms, and drying time. We were able to hire 4 women on a ~50 person team in a very short time, and it worked out pretty well.

"every tech company would be taking advantage of it" - nope, no one is. I don't know why but my guess is its hard to admit you're doing hiring wrong, hard to hire people who think differently than you, etc.

see: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EAG_PERS_SHARE...

Of course, in general, you can make a job more attractive (raise salaries, roll out red carpets, install slides...), and you will attract more people. That doesn't prove those people were an untapped talent pool.

Presumably there is a price that would make a high school teacher consider working in tech again. That doesn't imply companies should be willing to pay that price.

I keep seeing all these explanations that are just begging the question.

Are there specifics about hiring processes in tech that bias against or scare away female candidates?

1. The issue is certainly bigger than hiring. In the many years between birth and looking for a job, there are a lot of societal pressures that will impact what eventual careers people end up in.

2. Hiring managers are people. They are not perfect. They have biases. If someone expects an engineer to look, talk, and act a certain way, that can impact their decision making completely independent of the fact that they want to hire the best people for their company.

Bonus third point: I still see a whole lot of "We want to make sure that the hire fits on the team." This is completely natural, and comes with its own set of built-in biases.

1. There's no reason to expect that these women will be unemployed - they just won't be working for Amazon. That's all we know. No point going looking for them.

2. You can't assign intent to hiring decisions made in the training data - there's no reason to believe that men (and why single them out?) "did not want to hire women". Maybe they did. Maybe they have no idea that they're biased - maybe the women making such hiring decisions are just as biased. We have no idea.

3. The evidence that the AI is biased, is that.... the AI is biased. Which means that the training data is biased. Why that is, is a great question - it may reflect unconscious bias in the hiring process, or more obvious old-fashioned biases. It may reflect that the model amplifies some minor bias in the training data and turns it into something much bigger. We don't know.

So yeah, it's biased - the question is why.

Does nobody want money in a capitalist society?

This is of course very much dependant on the distribution shapes and I am too lazy to make a thorough analysis - but:

Let's assume that on average females were 10% more efficient programmers - but with the effort to find one female programmer you can find 10 male programmers. How much more effort do you need to find a 10% better programmer - twice as much as for the average one? Even if it was 8 times harder - then still it would make more sense to look for only men than for only women. Of course the optimal way would be to be unbiased and look for any gender.

I think that depends on how your hiring process looks like in general. You might, for example do a benevolent (from a certain POV) discrimination and simply start filtering applicants with something like a naive 20-line Python script that matches applicant names against female names from a dictionary and pushes them to the top of your applicant stack, so to speak.

And there are less tangible or directly measurable, but nonetheless important benefits to hiring women for a business: You can get free publicity and marketing if you run a successful women-only shop, there is a significant demand in the liberal media for female success stories and you can ride that wave.

...if and only if...

...there were no other factors at play that cause that market to remain untapped.

For further rational thinking, consider this. If there's a bias, it doesn't mean women won't get hired. It just means they won't get hired for the best positions. Everyone else gets Amazon's cast-offs.

That's exactly the same argument used to justify every regressive policy. If x was true then rational y action would happen.

But that's the poo tof racism and sexism rational y action doesn't happen due to the -ism.

Unconscious bias is a thing.

Or maybe women just aren't as smart as men.

Why is the health care field heavily biased in favor or female nurses and doctors? Are women smarter than men when it comes to biology/anatomy?

So, let's think about why we see gender roles in employment. Why are there so few women software engineers? One possible explanation is that women just aren't smart enough. If you don't believe that (and I don't), then you need another explanation. Maybe it's because of sexism. But if you don't want to believe it's sexism (as the OP implied), then what is it? They're not too dumb, and the hiring process isn't sexist, so why? And that's where hands come up empty.

That leads to nonsense like the person on this thread who said women are "wired differently", which presumably makes them less suitable. Which is just a polite way of saying women are too dumb to program, without facing the reality that that's exactly it means.

Except they're not, they're only empty if you haven't done any reading in this field.

> That leads to nonsense like the person on this thread who said women are "wired differently", which presumably makes them less suitable.

That was your supposition, not the only intepretation of those words. In fact, the weight of the evidence seems to support his statement, but similar to Damore, people like you are just fond of attacking reactionary strawman interpretations of the words actually employed.

> Which is just a polite way of saying women are too dumb to program, without facing the reality that that's exactly it means.

No it's not. "Wired differently" can mean many things, only one of which refers to competence.

Maybe anti-male sexism prevalent in the health care and education fields is causing women to prefer those fields.

Fix the sexism in health care/education. Elementary teachers should be 50% men. Nurses should be 50% men. Instead those fields are 90%(!) women! That is a HUGE level of bias and discrimination

Possibility 2: Those fields are female-dominated because they can't get into male-dominated fields.

So what do the pay and prestige look like for female fields, vs male fields? Well, take medical. Nurses (low prestige, low pay) are >90% female. Doctors (high prestige, high pay) are about 70% male.

This suggests to me that there's indeed a huge level of bias and discrimination, but not in the way you think.

Possibility 2: Those fields are male-dominated because they can't get into female-dominated fields.

Men do not work as teachers because the media has painted men as "sex crazed". Most mothers would be uncomfortable with having a male 4th grade teacher for their daughter.

Many women would be uncomfortable having a male gynecologist or a male nurse helping them deliver their baby.

> Doctors (high prestige, high pay) are about 70% male.

Sorry but this breaks your narrative: 60% of new MDs each year are female. However: female MDs are more likely to quit the profession or go part time in order to raise kids. Again, this might show anti-male discrimination because it is not socially acceptable for male doctors to quit work to stay home with the kids.

---

The above suggests to me that there's indeed a huge level of bias and discrimination, but not in the way you think.

-- edit: fwiw, I googled stats. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, 2017 was the first year ever that female medical school enrollment was greater than male medical school enrollment. I also went to graduation by year as far back as 2002, and it has always been more men than women. So yeah, your statistics are bullshit. Care to offer a source? --

And mind you, being a stay at home parent is considered a low-prestige, low-pay role. To the extent that it's discouraged for men, that's a result of a sexism that puts men in a dominant role and demeans them for doing "women's work".

The idea that men aren't teachers because the media paints them as sex-crazed is absurd. The gender disproportion of teachers existed long before the media mentioned such things at all. And you offer no evidence whatsoever for the assertion.

> Many women would be uncomfortable having a male gynecologist or a male nurse helping them deliver their baby.

And what is your opinion of the above bit of my previous post (since you avoided that in your answer?)

Is it possible men and women weight values differently when selecting occupations?

What is the payoff for pay and prestige and is it the same between genders?

I think the overwhelming evidence suggests it is not the same and that women value different things than men.

there seems to be a presupposition here that the the 'natural' proportion of women software engineers is 50%.

So what is the cause, then? Is it biological, or social, or random chance? "Random" doesn't seem likely, especially given how many other professions are male-dominated, and the relative economic and social power of those roles, compared to female-dominated professions.

"Biological", if it doesn't map directly to intelligence, needs another cause - something that can be measured. Do you have a suggestion for this? I don't.

"Social" is the most likely reason, but how is "social" different from "discrimination"? How do you define a social cause for men dominating the industry that can't be readily interpreted as discriminating against women?

I work in personality psychology research, so this whole IQ-centric line of reasoning is very dubious to me. There are many other influential phycological factors involved in people's lives that aren't (as far as we know) a direct result of nurture, and when taken together often make a more significant contribution to people's lives than their score in the single dimension of IQ. Learning disabilities and affective/mood disorders are a big example of this, and personality traits are just as impactful in how a person's life unfolds, regardless of intelligence.

A trait not being the direct result of nurture does not imply it's the result of a traditional long generic process, and this is something that we're only just beginning to scratch the surface of with epigenetics, so it's unlikely that such questions will get definitive answers anytime soon. That being said, the observation that a trait may be determined at birth only suggests that the trait is heritable, but not that it's genetic; those are two separate concepts, and heritability allows for much more variation from generation to generation, such as the case of children of immigrants from poor countries generally being taller than their parents when they're raised in western countries (which is likely due to improved nutrition enabling the full expression of their heritable height).

For example, you could ask the same question about whether the increase in learning disabilities and affective disorders within the past few generations in western societies is also "genetic". The default answer there of course, is that these conditions were only formalized as officially recognized diagnoses recently, and that such traits are only known to be heritable anyway (i.e. there are no definitively known "autism/adhd/etc genes" as of yet), so they're likely caused by the combination of the environment enabling the expression/observation of heritable predispositions. We can then similarly propose a null hypothesis to the male/female divide with the observation that western societies have only recently attempted to become more egalitarian by making various fields more equally attractive than they used to be, along with technological advances creating even more of such equally attractive opportunities, leading to heritable traits expressing themselves more noticeably through choices in the overall job market. In other words, being a professional "gamer" wasn't a viable job option 500yrs ago, but neither was being a professional "camgirl" either (to use two distinct, yet similar and stereotypically gendered "modern" occupations), but being a farmer was, in which case equal male/female distributions among farmers would've been the result of an underlying bottleneck in the pipeline, rather than the lack of one.

To suggest that this issue is either purely "genetic" or purely "social", is severely oversimplifying the matter.

Actually I grew up hearing exactly the opposite - that girls are smarter than boys and that girls "mature" faster than boys.

There is strong evidence that women are on average more interested in "people" and men more interested in "things". Several references in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Male nurses now actually can find they have an advantage in hiring because they often have an easier time with the lifting and physical labor being a nurse often requires.

My point is the comparison between nursing and programming is not strong.

There is a shortage of male therapists and kindergarten teachers: is that because males aren’t being hired or because there are fewer of them in existence?

Nobody is saying that the biases was caused because it was created by men who didn't want to hire women. That's a fear-mongering straw man.

What people are saying is that there was bias in the training data selected, and so the algorithm exacerbated that bias. Thus, being a cautionary tale about the training data you feed to these things.

" If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it."

You're assuming rationality where there really is no cause to do so.