> Expect at minimum 2 Medium difficulty questions in a phone interview that need to be able to be solved in optimal space time complexity in under 45 mins

I see this being repeated on Leetcode and Blind, but it is not my experience at all.

In 2019, I got Senior level (L5/E5) offers from everywhere I applied, including Facebook and Google. I never solved more than a single medium problem in 45m-1h. I was asked a hard problem maybe twice, and not at FB & G.

I also interviewed 100+ candidates at Microsoft and Google. I have seen hundreds of interview questions and feedback reports and I simply can't corroborate that statement.

Oh nice, I've been waiting for someone like you to reply. Thanks for replying, I need a perspective from you as well.

Why do you think it happens this way? I have some other anecdatas that I gathered from the forums but I am not gonna spew it here because it could be offensive/racist or whatever.

But what I think the more reasonable answer is, because interviewers are humans, and a lot of it are based on luck. Maybe the interviewer has a bad day? Maybe the interviewer has a favorite question that is super tricky and he/she really want to test this to the candidates.

I also think that due to your seniority, it seems that the FAANG companies already know that you know your stuffs. Since L5/E5 definitely not an easy task. Therefore you don't get a really hard question, because they don't need to determine whether you are a risk or not. They already know that you will perform great in the company.

Btw if you are doing your interview like this, I commend you. Thank you for not making life hard on people. I myself has gone through hundreds of Leetcode but still failed, due to the harsh questions that I've seen these days. Yet due to Leetcode I postpone learning other things that can serve me better in my career. It is stupid, but it is what it is. I know a lot of people can relate with me.

Anyway, please continue to do a great work of interviewing people! Maybe one day I will get my chance.

Googler here. I've probably done 150 interviews.

I've never once adjusted my question based on where the candidate was coming from. The idea that people would ease up if they saw FAANG on a resume or a 10+ year career is just not a thing I've ever seen.

There are a few truths in modern tech interviewing:

1. There is a large amount of randomness. Between the question that an interviewer chooses to ask and whether the interviewer is having a really bad day, you might just get screwed.

2. A lot of people are genuinely working really hard to do a good job interviewing. I've seen careful and detailed interview feedback and talked with a huge number of people who really care about interviewing well.

3. Interviewing has less oversight than ordinary work, so some people are bad at it and don't get feedback. Some people get back luck and are assigned one of these interviewers.

4. Interviewees suck at evaluating their experience. This means that when somebody says "I did everything well except I missed some impossible optimal algorithm and they rejected me so that's bullshit" you should become skeptical.

5. Angry people get signal boosted. Online discourse around interviewing is dominated by people with bad experiences.

You answered some of my questions in some other HN posts. I remember you.

Thanks for the replies.

Btw I am curious of this one thing. Say a FAANG has X years of experience in a FAANG company and then quit. When he/she reapplies to the company, is there any sort of stuff that makes he/she preferred over other candidates? Why I'm asking this question is this. I imagine that a FAANG engineer who has more than X years of experience, say x = 10, he/she must have better things to do rather than just memorizing 1000 Leetcode problems. Therefore if being judged strictly by using Leetcode style questions, I imagine he/she would not do well.

I only have experience with this at Google.

If you leave and then re-apply, hiring managers will look at your past performance reviews when considering you as a candidate. If your past performance reviews were excellent, it'll be a lot easier to come back. If you left another FAANG company... it doesn't matter beyond maybe making it easier to get a phone screen.

I expect that everybody has better things to do than memorizing Leetcode problems. That's because I don't expect people to memorize problems at all. I strongly believe that candidates should be able to succeed at the question I ask despite never having seen it before in their lives.

That makes sense. Thank you.

#5 Is very true, but also remember that outrage that the online masses finds particularly true and relatable gets signal boosted more.

What is considered a medium problem? Is this in terms of equivalence of problem levels found on leetcode and such? I have yet to do the grind. My current job is great and pays FAANG level- I hope to not have to engage in this crap.

Medium is defined as Leetcode's problem tagged in Medium category. It is quite blurry to be honest because some questions should be on Easy category and some Easy questions should be Medium and some Medium should be Hard and some Hard should be Medium.

That's good, keep that! Don't get involved in this crap. I have to do it out of necessity.

On leetcode they are literally marked "Medium". Mostly questions that involve some sort of BFS or DFS on graphs, figuring out the next available time slot in a meeting calendar, figuring out the best time to buy and sell a stock given the daily price, stuff like that.

Aren't sites like leetcode partially to blame for this? Years ago asking a candidate to push all zeros to the end of an array , in place, probably eliminated 75% of the pool. Now anyone who adequately prepares can probably solve that optimally in 10 minutes. I remember when asking for optimal solution to isPalindrome was a "bar raiser". I was recently told that I am expected to solve 2 medium-hard questions with clean code and good variable names and test cases in 30 minutes for phone screen. The recruiter emphasized that speed was a factor. The bar will keep increasing as people optimize for the test.

I think sites like Leetcode is not to blame, because they merely filling the gap. Btw Leetcode is really good for this sort of things because they actually put questions tagged for the companies based on people who have interviewed. The community there anonymously (obviously) always post and tag questions.

Back to your question. I think personally one (at least me) can blame: 1. The insane salary that these companies give 2. The not so amazing salary that the mid size and startups give, and these days, startups are imploding left and right, low hanging fruits are gone, IPOs are longer, VCs are more greedy, etc.

The money is to blame here, and this is a direct result of tech giants growth being unchecked. If somehow we can level the playing field more, then this DS&A problem will go away.

But if we don't solve the money problem, then no matter how many experiences and senior architect titles you have in your career, if the money doesn't beat FAANG money, then a lot of people will constantly chase FAANG money as the end goal. As a result, a lot of companies that knows this know that it is hard to contest FAANG in terms of compensation, therefore these mid-tier companies and startups are okay living with the reality that one day their employees will jump ship anyway, so we don't need to raise their salary as much and just get a fresh body to replace him/her when that happens.

Maybe expectations are different for senior engineers, but from my experience in applying/getting into FAANG last year, I was only asked easy/medium algorithm questions.

I felt the algorithm questions were more of a technical bar/weeder, far more emphasis was placed on the behavioral, practical, and architecture questions.

I did around a month of casual prep for the algorithm questions, about an hour after work.

Thank you for the reply. I asked a follow up question in another reply that is similar like you as well above.

I was agreeing with you until you used the phrase "diversity hire" in your comment. I think that you could have made the same point without inferring that the hiring bar has been lowered for employees in underrepresented groups. That's a pretty terrible thing to say to anyone who is in one of those groups.

I won't dispute whether you think it's a terrible thing to say, but preferential treatment towards demographics categorized as "diverse" is something I've both witnessed and taken part in during my time so far in tech. At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, many tech companies are setting targets of >30% women in engineering roles despite the fact that they make up 20-25% of the tech workforce. Achieving these numbers necessitates discrimination.

Note that you're putting words in the other poster's mouth when you write that "the hiring bar has been lowered". Not all forms of discrimination involve lowering the hiring bar. From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates. The hiring bar is the same for diverse and non-diverse, it's just that diverse candidates are more likely to get a chance to attempt to pass that hiring bar.

>From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates.

How is this different from any other targeted recruiting? FAANG recruits students from CMU while not even visiting my alma mater. Recruiters extend phone interviews to referrals at 100% rate no matter how bad they suck, etc. Diversity recruiting != diversity hiring, and the numbers bare that out. Unless you argue that recruiters should have zero targeted pipelines I'm not sure how it's unique for diversity initiatives

You're right, it isn't. But are people offended when people say that FAANG gives more opportunity to CMU grads than community college grads? Not in my experience. Speaking as a grad from one of the universities mentioned, I can say with certainty that and education from those institutions opens up a lot of doors and that pointing that fact out is fair.

The major difference is that both CMU and your alma is seen to welcome both women and men (and people of different colors, cultural backgrounds, religion, social economical status and so on).

Targeted recruiting from single sex schools or religious universities would be different, but there aren't many such universities in the first place.

However, targeted recruiting for high prestige university tend to create discrimination for social economical status, which discriminate against people who were not lucky enough to be born by rich parents.

It's different because having the preferred genitalia isn't equal to having a degree from a top university.

You can't really blame the companies. CMU has a great track record why wouldn't they go there.

It is my anecdata, and take it as what it is. I've seen it myself a few times.

Take it as what it is, downvote it all you want. A freedom of speech for everyone.

"I've seen it myself" - So you've sat on FAANG hiring panels that made decisions specifically based on candidates' underrepresented demographics? Or you're just inferring based on people you met while employed at a FAANG? Or...?

I've sat at company hiring panels, and have taken part in discriminatory policies first hand. At career fairs, Dropbox recruiters had us mark candidate resumes with a star for diverse candidates, two starts for "double diverse" candidates (female + URM), and "ND" for Asian male candidates. It turns out "ND" stands for "negative diversity". Literally the first thing we did was bucket candidates by the desirability of their demographics. Recruiters also got higher bonuses for recruiting diverse candidates, along with bonuses for more experienced candidates. The diverse bonus was equal to the difference between hiring an entry level IC1 and an IC6 (senior staff engineer).

Usually discrimination doesn't take place in the hiring panels. Rather it's done by the people given incentives to discriminate, usually recruiters. Recruiters can infer candidates' race and gender with census data on names, and advance diverse candidates to phone screens more often than non-diverse candidates.

I can also detail the company's "opportunistic hiring" plans if you want to hear more.

I would like to hear more, but maybe HN doesn't want to. If you don't care about the risk of downvoting and this being on HN, please write so. But if not, it is ok.

This is the part of the document that described the motivation:

> The Problem Statement

> Based on 177 like tech companies in Silicon Valley (market research and EOO-1 Diversity Statistics data), the percentage of diverse engineering talent is sparse. In short, 4.7% are latino, 2.1% are African American, and 19.2% are female. These candidates are being targeted with all of our top competitors with white gloves tactics, strategic outreach, and engagement strategies, while Dropbox has yet to systematically establish any of these practices to compete for this top talent and showcase our uniquely inclusive, dynamic, and thoughtful culture.

> Opportunity to market DBX [Dropbox] more broadly:

> Moreover, diverse engineers are the most sought after group of individuals on the market today. While the average response rate to engage is high (37%) the rate at which they are interested in moving forwards is quite low (11%). We interpret this in two ways: > First, due to the small pool and scarcity of diverse talent, companies are motivated to keep their diverse talent happy, well-compensated, and engaged; prospects are rarely on the market, and when they are, it is a highly calculated and careful search based on existing relationships. > Second, traditional sourcing engagement methods (email, LinkedIn) do not adequately showcase what makes Dropbox special, and because these candidates are so highly sought-after, it would serve us to highlight our culture early on, and to take a more long term approach to courting them.

And here's the proposed solution

> Opportunistic Hiring

> As the business needs shift and open roles become more narrow, it will become difficult to find a home for diverse candidates that we're able to engage and who pass our bar. Wee feel like it would be a disservice to use in the long-term if we miss out on hiring critical talent for Dropbox because of current headcount constraints. To this end, we propose that Eng VP's withhold 20 heads to hire opportunistically. > When a diverse/URM candidate is interested in interviewing, regardless of headcount, we will put them through the process. If they pass the TPS [technical phone screen] we will bring them onsite and evaluate based on their skillset. * If the candidate goes to HC [hiring committee], we will proactively find a sponsor/team home for the candidate, and that team would receive a preciously withheld headcount for that hire.

This was announced April of 2019. I've transcribed parts of the document that announced this policy above. I can't speak as to whether or not this is still in place as I have since left Dropbox.

Interestingly, Dropbox already 23% women in tech roles[1] at the time that this was announced - larger than the figure of 19% shown above.

1. https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/an-update-on-diversi...

Thanks for the update. It is an interesting read.

I used to think naively that checking these boxes does nothing: - "I prefer not to disclose my sexual preference" - "I prefer not to disclose my race/ethnicity" - "I prefer not to disclose whether I'm a veteran or not"

Anyway, it is a sad read for people like me who don't get preferential treatment. It seems like I'm being salty, but it is just the reality. People like me studied hours and hours doing Leetcode and sacrificing other things, even sacrificing things that should have helped our career better, such as learning relevant skills like techniques, libraries, etc. It is what it is. Naively think about meritocracies.

If I can just write a huge *sigh here, it is what I'm currently doing right now. I don't care about downvotes. I just need to rant.

Anyway thank you for the replies! I really appreciate it.

"preferential treatment"????? your baseline is privileged. diversity hiring is attempting to negate reduced or lack of privilege.

your competition is not women or minorities. it's other majority groups, because more of them are interviewed and hired.

Well that's generalizing isn't it? Not every Asian male sounding name person actually have a good track record in their family, free of abuse, loving both dad and mom, good education, know how to do math to the point of memorizing the entire Pi numbers.

There are people who are outside of the normal as well. Why not give them privilege by hearing their stories as well?

Or better, why not discard the preferential treatment and do it based on meritocracy? I know this can't be done in today's world, just hoping.

Not every white person comes from a rich, educated family either. I'm very familiar with this being a white, uneducated, disabled female from the Midwest US with an uneducated, abusive, lower-middle class family.

Meritocracy does literally nothing to aid less privileged people to get ahead. It primarily helps those who started with privilege in the first place which is mostly limited to select groups.

I'm not sure why pointing out the fact that this forces members of the same race or gender to compete against each other for a limited number of spots is justification. The fact that we're allocating some hiring slots for certain races and genders, while others have to compete for a more limited number of slots is the problem.

Furthermore, this policy announced when the company's tech workforce was already higher than the industry's representation in the metro area. So they were using discrimination to increase an already existing overrepresentation.

> Anyway, it is a sad read for people like me who don't get preferential treatment.

Yup, we marginalized groups get all the breaks. /s

Were you required to remove stars already on the resume? If not, then I know just what to do.

Where on my resume should I put the two stars? Are those the traditional hand-written style, with the lines crossing to make a pentagon in the middle? What sort of pen or pencil should I use?

We wrote the stars ourselves - normal 5 point star style. If you wrote the stars yourself recruiters would probably cross them out and write in the stars that correctly reflect your diversity status.

So basically I know a few people who can't even solve an Easy Leetcode questions. They got in as SWE L3/L4, E3/E4 and I also know one L5.

Can you help me in explaining why? I don't have the intention of looking down on people. I'm just gathering data. If I can find a reasonable explanation then I want to take a look at it, and learn from it, and see where did I do wrong, so I can improve and pass the interviews next time.

I knew a lot of people at FAANG that were L4/L5 that couldn't solve Leetcode easies. Leetcode isn't part of the job, just the interviews.

Getting an offer is not just a matter of solving a programming problem. It's about how you communicate. And, of course, if you're a brilliant jerk ability doesn't matter: you're not getting hired.

If you're not getting past the interviews despite being a strong programmer, you may want to really think deeply about how you're communicating with your interviewer. Remember, the vast majority of people who are getting offers aren't women or minorities so that's probably not what's blocking you.

Your experience matches my anecdote. Hence you can imagine my total confusion once I got the interview myself (Google, 2 times, phone to onsite, Amazon one time to onsite, Facebook, one phone). In my latest FB phone for example. I was asked a Medium question that I've never seen before, and nevertheless I solved it. How do I know? Because apparently that was taken straight from Leetcode, and the interviewer didn't even bother to change the question. I copy pasted my solution to Leetcode, run it, pass 100% test cases.

I got rejected....

I asked for feedback from the recruiter. Apparently I needed to do 2 Medium questions in the allocated time. I solve the first Medium question in about 30 mins, and there was only 10 mins left for the 2nd one so the interviewer didn't bother to ask me the 2nd one.

The scenario that I just told you above is not unique. Venture enough to cscareerquestions and Leetcode forum you'll be surprised to see many many worse experience than this.

Keep trying. I hate to say it, but luck is a factor. The process is by no means objective. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting the right interviewer.

Thank you. I am currently pivoting to learning other things that are more practical in the job. I did enough Leetcode that I started to like it (Stockholm's syndrome).

That's what companies mean by diversity as well.

Diversity hire, not diversity.

That is correct. Please see my other comments. I don't have the intention to look down on people.

So if that candidate cannot even answer Easy/Medium Leetcode questions but got offer, then yes. Is that not clear enough?

You just said that a diversity hire is anyone who is female or an under-represented minority. I think this comment is what you meant to say. Explicitly, if a candidate is a female or an under-represented minority, AND they do not stack up to standards.

Ah I see, so that's where the misinterpretation come from. Sorry, that's not what I meant.

I meant to say that if a minority gets offer without being able to pass even Easy/Medium questions, then yes it is a diversity hire.

Thanks for the clarification.

Care to elaborate?

But it undeniably has, and I've had multiple older women in management express to me that they felt their position was less respected because of the company's overt push to hire women.

Sure, in theory we're correcting the injustices brought about by inequality, but what we're really doing is presuming that minorities need extra help and white men do not, without considering that all people have struggles and, frankly, it's racist/sexist to judge people by skin color and/or gender.

You can easily invent a dozen ways to claim someone's life is underprivileged, but we only have a handful that are allowed in hiring considerations, and they all happen to be "not white or male."

It's terrifying to see how casually acceptable this has become.

The presumption here is that white and Asian men get extra help by default, and the rest are penalised. This has enough evidence in favour that I would call it a theory and not a hypothesis.

Making this view more public would help.

Worked at FAANG. There are diversity programs because most engineers are white and Asian men with professional networks composed almost entirely of white and Asian men. Referrals are a big source of talent, so you can imagine what that does to our hiring pipeline. But there are no diversity hires. Everyone who's hired has to pass the bar.

That's not entirely true because the bar isn't deterministic. For example, diverse candidates are given two attempts to pass a phone screen.

Candidates from well represented backgrounds are also given two attempts. It depends. In general, most candidates aren't given two attempts irrespective of background.

Many non "diverse" hires are also given two attempts.

Let's put it straight: most diverse candidates are given 2 attempts; while most regular candidates are given 1 attempt.

This is far from the truth.

Totally agree.

>So for those FAANG engineers that were able to get in early, whether by acquihire, by diversity hire, by luck, by normal hire

Can we please stop assuming that being a minority or woman is some kind of hiring free pass? It's often quite the opposite.

But more to your point, I've been cynically wondering if the untenably high bar set for technical interviews serves as an industry-wide means of lowering turnover.

Also very confused about what constitutes a pass or failure, with the opaquely-defined expectations. I'd love to be able to prepare for my technicals, but usually end up wildly misleading information from recruiters about what the technical entails. (Why are you testing me on Java!? I never claimed to have any experience with Java. I was told this would be a behavioral interview!)

At every company I have worked at, policies were in place to extend greater opportunity to URM and women candidates. Most large companies are setting diversity targets well in excess of the share of women and URM workers in software development other engineering roles at the company. This necessitates discrimination to achieve this over representation. For example, Dropbox announced a goal of 33% women in engineering roles when I was there in 2019. My currently employer has a goal of 30% women in engineering.

This typically doesn't result in easier interviews. Rather it was implemented by giving recruiters incentives (larger bonuses, or penalties for failure to meet a certain %) to hire diverse candidates. At my current company, over 50% of engineering candidates phone screened last year were women (and were given phone screens at a rate twice as high as men). In other words, framing diversity hiring as "giving a free pass" isn't quite accurate. Rather the companies increase their diversity by adjusting the rate at which diverse and non-diverse candidates are let into the interview process.

If we could quantify the net effects of sexism and racism in hiring and attrition, we could compare whether the incentives mentioned offset the sexism and racism equivalently. But, since we don't have a means of doing so, it's a futile discussion on this site. Also worth pointing out that just hiring a diverse candidate is pretty meaningless if they get bullied or harassed to the point of being forced out in a short order.

But that's beside the point (or, beside the tangent to the point). The context of "diversity hire" above parallels being diverse and getting hired to an acquihire or getting lucky. That's very different than what you outlined above.

Whether one thinks that discrimination in hiring is justified to offset suspected discrimination in other areas is besides the point. The point is, there exists discrimination in hiring that results in women and URM candidates getting offers that would not have been obtained were it not for diversity status. The opportunities of people categorized as diverse in tech company interviewing is substantially different from those not categorized as diverse. Maybe I'm biased towards the SF bay area, but there's a palpable mismatch between how common and prevalent these practices are and the offense people take when they're acknowledged.

I'm not sure why you think what I'm saying is different. At my company, white and asian male new grads are only given a chance to interview if they're CS (or math, EE, or other tech majors) grads from top universities like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. Candidates from boot camps, less well known universities, or non-tech majors are only extended the chance to interview if they're diverse. Does that mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp who gets hired is unskilled? No, probably not. Does it mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp would not have been hired if they weren't diverse? Yes, because non-diverse candidates from boot camps don't get interviewed at all.

Maybe I'm biased toward the SF Bay Area, but the mismatch between the prevalence of these policies and the discomfort with acknowledgement of their existence is concerning.

No, it's not an SF Bay Area thing. I've moved to SF from the Midwest a year ago, and have been called racial slurs more times during my year here than in my entire adult life living in a medium-sized Midwestern town. Shall we assume that because you haven't had a similar experience or personally faced discrimination on the job that no one else has?

Exaggerating the status of "diversity hires" just ignores the harsh reality of rampant discrimination in the tech industry. And not just on the basis of sex and race, but age and disability too. There wouldn't need to be such a hard push for underrepresented candidates if it were a more welcoming, diverse workforce in the first place.

Who is getting the short or long end of the stick is not something I aim to answer, or even purport to be able to answer. This is a matter of perspective. I'm a Hispanic person that attended an elite university and have household names on my resume. I'd have a good chance of getting interviews regardless of my gender or ethnicity - and when you do take ethnicity into account it probably helps me even more. I'm largely indifferent towards this kind of discrimination in hiring. But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

The only thing that bothers me is attempting to equate acknowledgement of these practices as offensive or taboo. The reality is that this is what many companies are doing. Thus, the only way one can avoid offense in that scenario is to deny reality.

> No, no they really dont!

Yes, they really do. I've explained the details my employers' hiring processes to white and asian men trying to get into tech, and the majority feel like it is an overall benefit to diverse candidates - other discrimination in tech notwithstanding. Really, how can you write this? Do your claim to know the opinions of every white and asian man in this country?

My point is, that the fact that diverse tech workers may face discrimination in other ways (e.g. slurs as you pointed out) doesn't necessarily "even out" discrimination in hiring that favors diverse candidates. Someone who can't land an interview may feel that the opportunity to get a job, even if it comes at the expense of other forms of hostility, is a net positive.

> What a horrifying thing to say. Normalizing racial and sexual harassment is a large part of the problem. Are you going to claim you don't understand how the tech industry is so homogenous while simultaneously claiming that racial slurs are just some inconsequential price of admission in tech?

The idea that discrimination in hiring is justified because of other forms of discrimination (such as slurs) is something you originally claimed:

> Exaggerating the status of "diversity hires" just ignores the harsh reality of rampant discrimination in the tech industry. And not just on the basis of sex and race, but age and disability too. There wouldn't need to be such a hard push for underrepresented candidates if it were a more welcoming, diverse workforce in the first place.

Your message here is that discrimination in hiring is necessary and justified because of other forms of discrimination. This seems like the "price of admission" mentality you refer to above. Whether or not this is "Horrifying" is up to you, but lets be clear: the idea that one form of discrimination justifies another form of discrimination is an idea that you originally brought up.

For what it's worth, I'm of the mind that two wrongs don't make a right. If people are being treated with contempt on the basis of race, then the appropriate response is to curb that behavior - not discriminate in favor of the targeted demographic in hiring. Claiming that one slurs are okay because candidates are beneficiaries of discrimination is wrong. So is claiming that discrimination is okay because these people are subject to slurs, or other forms of hostility.

> Also, the notion that racial slurs are "the price of admission" is something you seem to have brought up - not me

> Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual. Or, "a small price to pay."

Whereas what I was saying is that the policies which you cited incentivisng more diverse applicants to apply doesn't even begin to counter the ubiquitous prejudice in hiring and on the job. If it did, minorities and women would be over-represented in tech rather than under-represented.

The whole "minority free pass" idea is what grates on me. Plenty of hiring managers have unconscious biases against women, minorities, older candidates, people with disabilities, etc. So, it's throwing more diverse candidates into a situation where diverse candidates are going to be disproportionately rejected.

But the employers who actually incentivize diverse candidates are also frequently over-emphasized despite it being an uncommon practice. The boilerplate EEOC "we encourage diverse candidates to apply" statement is usually just that: an empty boilerplate put there for legal purposes, backed with zero action behind it. More often than not, it's nothing close to what you've described above

> I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual.

I don't think it's business as usual, and looking back on my comments I never wrote this. Again, the first one of us bring this up was you when you justified discrimination in hiring as a means to offset discrimination elsewhere. What I wrote was,

> But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

that many white or Asian people struggling to get into tech see the employment opportunities conferred by diversity status as outweighing the other forms of discrimination that diverse workers may face - not that the latter is justified as "the price of admission".

> The whole "minority free pass" idea is what grates on me. Plenty of hiring managers have unconscious biases against women, minorities, older candidates, people with disabilities, etc. So, it's throwing more diverse candidates into a situation where diverse candidates are going to be disproportionately rejected. But the employers who actually incentivize diverse candidates are also frequently over-emphasized despite it being an uncommon practice. The boilerplate EEOC "we encourage diverse candidates to apply" statement is usually just that: an empty boilerplate put there for legal purposes, backed with zero action behind it. It's just usually nothing close to what you described above

First of all, it is a common practice at least as far as what I've experienced. Some companies, like Intel, went so far as withholding unless diversity quotas are met.

And second, if the hiring managers have biases then eliminate those biases. If a company suspects that biases are causing women, minorities, etc. to not get offers then excluding white and Asian men to pad the former's representation doesn't create an equal hiring process. It just creates a hiring process that discriminates against both women, URM and White and Asian candidates. Furthermore, while it's common to see people cite unconscious biases against women and URM candidates in tech hiring studies trying to actually measure this often don't find this suspected bias. In fact, they often find bias in favor of diverse candidates. Interviewing.io experimented with blind hiring and actually found a slight preference in favor of women [1]. Studies in university STEM faculty recruiting found a 2:1 bias in favor of women [2].

1. https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

2. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.abs...

> Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words.

Let's reread the sentence in context:

> But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

Say you have two people in a coding boot camp. One is a woman, the other a white or asian man. They get the same scores and are just as capable. At my current and previous employers, only the former would get a chance to interview.

If the latter looked at this situation, and concluded that they would have better career opportunities if they were a woman - even if it meant additional discrimination in other forms, like being subject to slurs - then they're "breath-takingly racist"?

I'm also confused as to why you're calling me racist for pointing out the fact that many white and asian men feel like the tech industry's treatment towards them on the basis of race and gender is a net negative. Again, these are the opinions of people other than myself. The fact that you're exclusively quoted this sentence without the preceding one suggests that you either forgot this fact, or are deliberately attempting to conceal it.

> I'm referring to tech hiring in the private sector.

Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.

And I've heard hiring managers say racist and sexist comments on prospective employees all throughout my career. And neglect to mentor or promote them. And freeze them out of the team. I suppose the strawman you've set up outweighs the actual racist and sexist discrimination in hiring, which only seems to exist to you as some abstraction, rather than real people losing their livelihoods because of sexual harassment and racist bullying.

> Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.

Ah yes, the highly regarded International Journal of blog.interview.io. How did I miss this groundbreaking research?

What you call a strawman is exactly the kind of discrimination that exists at my current employer and at my previous employer. This is reality. And the discrimination isn't small or subtle. We're talking about aggregate 2-3x times less likely to get a phone interview as a diverse candidate. Is harassment or bullying equal to or greater than the impact of this preference in hiring? There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.

Calling the latter "frothing", "breath-takingly racist" is an incredibly hostile thing to say, and it makes me question whether people actually want to discuss the impact of discrimination in hiring or want to shut down discussion by making it taboo.

Also interviewing.io actually conducts interviews on a large scale, and is probably one of the best positioned organization to conduct this sort of experiment. Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?

And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism. And rather supports the breathtakingly racist claim above.

> Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?

Forgive me, I didn't realize they were the leading authority on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought a publication by psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts to seek out, not a blog post.

> And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism.

Right, they are different. The latter makes people uncomfortable or alienated at their job. The former keeps people from getting jobs in the first place on the basis of race and gender.

Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.

> Forgive me, I didn't realize they were subject matter experts on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts, not a blog.

This reads like a total non-sequitur. Interviewing.io compared non-anonymous interview performance of women to anonymous interview performance, and found that there was little discrepancy (in fact it found a slight positive bias in favor of women). Why are you referring to sociology and psychology in a study focused on anonymous vs. non-anonymous interview performance? Also, why would African American Studies relate to studying potential gender bias in hiring? It seems like you just assumed that this study was focused on black candidates, when in reality it was studying potential bias with respect to gender.

> So, you're saying racial slurs are better than diverse hiring?

I answered this question:

> Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.

> Thanks for definitively putting the "Are you a racist?" question to rest. I think we're about done here.

This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion. You're branding people as racist for looking at the world from a different perspective.

If you met an Asian man who graduated from a boot camp and failed to get phone interviews while his diverse peers got interviews and jobs, would you tell him to his face that he's racist if he thinks he's getting a short end of the stick? If he felt that having a job, even if it meant additional bullying or harassment, was better than not having a job at all would you genuinely tell him that being unemployed and Asian is better than being employed and black, female, or Latino?

Let me turn this question back to you:

> So, you're saying racial slurs are preferable to diverse hiring?

Between getting a tech job but being subject to racial slurs vs. not having a tech job at all, yes many people conclude that the former is the better outcome. I think the former is more disadvantageous. But I'm speaking from the privileged position of already having a tech job. People who don't have the security of already having a tech job often think differently. And it's not right for me to dismiss their views as racist for being different from mine.

Not to mention, non-diverse people are subject to slurs too. I've witnesses more hostility towards Asians than any other race, yet diversity hiring penalizes them hardest.

> This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion.

Ah yes, the old "You're intolerant of our intolerance" chestnut. Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently denying the realities of racial biases in hiring, and portraying any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism. Oh, and look: more strawmen.

> Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently glossing over the realities of racial biases in hiring by painting any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism.

If this is your takeaway, then I don't think you've been getting the message that I've been trying to convey this whole time.

There are benefits and drawbacks of being diverse in tech. You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.

Someone who is diverse and subject to bullying or harassment might think, if I weren't diverse I might have diminished career opportunities but it'd be worth it to avoid this harassment. By comparison, a non-diverse aspiring tech working might think, If I were diverse I might be subject to more harassment or bullying but the career opportunities would be worth it. Which one is right? They both are, because these are their opinions. Trying to say one is right is like trying to identify the correct flavor of ice cream.

And the "strawmen" are real diversity hiring polices I've encountered. If you're a boot camp grad and you applied to Dropbox between 2014 and 2019 you only got an interview if you were diverse. Dismissing the things I've personally witnessed as strawmen makes me think your opinion comes from a perspective that is not aware of the extent of diversity hiring. Perhaps you'd think differently if you worked at my current and past employers and witnesses our hiring policies.

> You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.

It's actually pretty clear which of these has the greater impact. Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech. Which I've already stated above.

And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...

> Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech.

They often are. At Dropbox women made up over 23% of tech roles in 2018 while recruiters estimated that the Bay Area average is 19.2%. That's an overrepresentation of ~20%. At my current employer, last year 50% of engineering hires were women - 2.5x the industry wide representation (though that was an anomaly - it usually averages ~30%).

> And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...

At this point you seem to be offended by the notion that one can even try to compare the impact of racial or gendered slurs or harassment with denying White and Asian men employment opportunities on the basis of their race and gender. There's really nothing to say except that people will compare these two things regardless of your objections, and some of them reach the conclusion that the former outweighs the latter.

Overrepresentation of the population. Do I really need to explain how 23% compares to 50%?

And I'm offended because it's wildly offensive. You've repeatedly insisted racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring practices are somehow worse. And seem to think some amount of explanation on your part will make it seem like it's a reasonable stance instead of a deeply and reprehensibly racist one. Instead it just makes you look like a verbose clan leader.

> Overrepresentation of the population. Do I really need to explain how 23% compares to 50%?

So tech companies should strive to be 50% women even though the tech industry is only 20% female (or slightly less)? This would mean that women in tech have to be hired at 4x the rate as men in tech. Ultimately how you choose to frame equality is up to you, but I'm confident in saying that most would not consider a company that hires 50/50 men and women when the industry is made up 80/20 of men and women to be offering equal opportunity to men and women. It creates an outcome representative of the general population, but at the expense of creating massive inequality of opportunity within the tech industry itself.

> You've repeatedly insisted racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring practices are far worse.

Identify where I've said this? Because I've been very consistent in emphasizing that which is worse is a matter of perspective. In fact, I've specifically pointed out that it is not reasonable to say one is worse than the other because these are subjective judgements.

And lastly, trying to equate harboring different opinions on affirmative action in employment to being a leader in the KKK is really not called for. This is getting to the point where I'm convinced that this conversation is going nowhere.

> So tech companies should strive to be 50% women even though the tech industry is only 20% female (or slightly less)?

You seem to not understand what the term "representative" means. Or notice the circular logic implicit in your argument.

> Identify where I've said this?

You mean the last several posts of yours, where you've said it repeatedly, that you're now hilariously trying to backpeddle? You're welcome to re-read your posts. And the quotes I have of your posts, claiming racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring is worse.

> And lastly, trying to equate harboring different opinions on affirmative action in employment to being a leader in the KKK is really not called for.

It's not that the opinions you expressed are different, it's that they're repugnant. There's a difference.

> You seem to not understand what the term "representative" means.

So the answer is yes? Companies should strive to be 50/50 men and women tech roles even though the ratio in the workforce is 80/20? Representation is inherently relative, and that what I'm getting at here. Is your idea of an equal workplace one that is representative of the population (50/50 even though workforce is 80/20?) or one that is representative of the workforce (80/20 if the workforce is 80/20)? I know full well what representative means, but I'm asking you: representative with respect to what?

> You mean the last five posts of yours, where you've said it repeatedly, that you're now hilariously trying to backpeddle? You're welcome to re-read your posts. And the quotes I have of your posts, claiming racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring is worse.

Let's see:

> Who is getting the short or long end of the stick is not something I aim to answer, or even purport to be able to answer. This is a matter of perspective. I'm a Hispanic person that attended an elite university and have household names on my resume. I'd have a good chance of getting interviews regardless of my gender or ethnicity - and when you do take ethnicity into account it probably helps me even more. I'm largely indifferent towards this kind of discrimination in hiring. But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

Here I explicitly say that I don't aim to answer whether one outweighs the other, and that people can find valid answers for either.

> There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.

Again, I point out that all I'm trying to convey is that there are people who think differently than you on this topic and that it's not valid to dismiss these perspectives as racist.

> Between getting a tech job but being subject to racial slurs vs. not having a tech job at all, yes many people conclude that the former is the better outcome. I think the former is more disadvantageous. But I'm speaking from the privileged position of already having a tech job. People who don't have the security of already having a tech job often think differently. And it's not right for me to dismiss their views as racist for being different from mine.

Here is the only instance where I actually state my personal opinion, which is actually agreeing with you.

> Someone who is diverse and subject to bullying or harassment might think, if I weren't diverse I might have diminished career opportunities but it'd be worth it to avoid this harassment. By comparison, a non-diverse aspiring tech working might think, If I were diverse I might be subject to more harassment or bullying but the career opportunities would be worth it. Which one is right? They both are, because these are their opinions. Trying to say one is right is like trying to identify the correct flavor of ice cream.

I think I've been very consistent in emphasizing that people with different lived experiences can arrive at different answers to these questions.

Weighting diversity against equal opportunity is something that this industry struggles to do effectively. We can't have a good faith discussion on this topic while simultaneously claiming that the notion that these policies create an environment that is more disadvantaging to non-diverse people as compared to diverse people is racist and likening people who think so to clansmen.

> So the answer is yes? Companies should strive to be 50/50 men and women tech roles even though the ratio in the workforce is 80/20?

The answer is: "No, I do not see the obvious circular logic." The tech sector is 80/20 due to hiring bias in the population that defines the workplace demographic. It could be 0% women and your fallacious argument would still conveniently hold.

And you follow that up with quotes of ...yourself. And commentary on your self-quoting. You don't seem to get that it's not that I don't comprehend your premise. It's that your premise, and by extension you, are being reprehensible and racist. You do not seem to understand that saying racist things is racist. And that you are racist. And reprehensible. For being so racist.

> The tech sector is 80/20 because of hiring bias in the population that defines the workplace demographic.

And evidence of that is...? Graduates in the fields of study that feed into the tech workforce are 80/20 - why do we conclude that the industry is biased when it is representative of the population that chooses to go into tech? A valid response is to say that men and women's choices of study are the product of a biased society that pushes men into tech and women into other fields. But at this point, what we're saying is that tech is representative of the workforce, and the workforce is representative of the people that choose to try and go into tech. This is not one, but two layers of indirection and many are not of the opinion that broader societal trends that produce unequal rates of men and women choosing to work in technology should be counteracted with discrimination in the workplace to push this representation towards parity.

You can say that "saying racist things is racist" all you want - my point is that putting opposition to affirmative action in the workplace under the category of racist informs me that your usage of the term "racist" largely equates to "people who have an opinion contrary to my own:, that discrimination in hiring is more disadvantageous than bullying or harassment in the workplace". This is a reductive strategy, and it's not unique to people who support diversity hiring. There are plenty of people who say, "discrimination on the basis of protected class like race and gender is illegal and racist - discrimination, regardless of the guise of 'diversity hiring' is reprehensible, full stop" and it's just as reductive. How would you respond to someone who said that quote to you? I'd probably write them off as being too entrenched in their view to have a meaningful exchange, and that is unfortunately the conclusion I'm left with here.

You've been breaking the site guidelines horribly, not only in this flamewar but in several others recently, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728949 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22727685 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724383. That's not ok, regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are. If you keep doing it, we will ban you.

Actually, what you've been doing is already beyond bannable, and we've had to warn you more than once in the past. Please stop this and don't do anything like it on HN again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair. But as long as I keep coming across racially insensitive comments like in the original post, and commenters who strongly believe these kinds of comments are a legitimate perspective, I'm not going to be able to just leave them as is. And I don't see a way to constructively engage with those kinds of comments that doesn't end in this type of exchange.

Consequently, I'm going to request that you delete my account (...If that's a thing that you can do on here. I'm not really sure. Otherwise a ban seems close enough.) I think just lurking on here would be a better option under these circumstances.

Sorry for the trouble.

> Yes, underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias.

It's literally not.

Men account for 90% of convictions for homicide and other serious forms of violence in the US, and the overwhelming majority of countries abroad. Is that evidence of overwhelming misandry and bias in criminal justice? There's been demonstration of some bias, IIRC men tend to get 40-60% longer sentences. But that's nowhere near enough to account for this disparity. The reality is men do commit more violence than women and the disparity of men in prison for violence so this overrepresentation of men is not the product of bias, but rather men's own decisions.

Similarly, women make up the majority of professions like speech pathology, education, publishing with some of these over 90% female. Do we conclude that this is because of rampant bias against men? Perhaps, but in order to prove that we'd have to prove that these institutions prefer female applicants over male applicants. A non-bias explanation is that 90% of applicants are female, because 90% of people who want to go into these jobs are women.

Not only is underrepresentation not evidence of bias, the lack of underrepresentation does not absolve a group of bias. For instance, say a tech company decided it wanted to have an engineering workforce representative of the general population with respect to gender. 20% of the applications it gets are from women, so the company randomly throws away 75% of the male applications to make it so that an equal number of people go on to the phone screen, and subsequent on-site. This produces an engineering workforce that is perfectly representative of the population's gender distribution. But it is overwhelmingly biased against men and in favor of women. Obviously real-world tech companies are rarely this extreme - I've personally only seen OKRs calling for 33% at most. The point is, force equal or closer-to-equal outcomes in spite of unequal decisions made by people often entails the creation of bias, rather than its elimination. Do you really think that a company can achieve 50% women in tech without biasing their interview process in favor of women? The only company that even gets close to 50/50 practices explicit quota hiring:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThoughtWorks#Hiring_and_divers...

Ultimately, at this point I think your conception that bias has a 1:1 relationship with representation relative to general population is fundamentally different from mine in a way that makes it difficult to productively explore the value of affirmative action in the hiring process.

>Do you really think that a company can achieve 50% women in tech without biasing their interview process in favor of women?

I strongly recommend looking up the word "bias" in the dictionary.

Systemic and institutional bias in tech hiring isn't disproven by of the existence of female-dominated fields. Yes, some fields are female dominated while others are male-dominated. (Such a revelation!)

It sounds like you're angling for the "male nurses are oppressed by the matriarchy!" trope, or some kind of gender essentialist nonsense. I'll be sure to adjust my insults accordingly, now that you've moved on from blatant racism to sexist dogwhistles.

Do go on, I'm curious to see at what point you move on to full-blown misogyny. I'm looking forward to seeing how many words you write insisting that you're not misogynistic either, while making offensive guesses as to the root cause of these biases in hiring.

> I strongly recommend looking up the word "bias" in the dictionary.

From the fist Google result [1], "prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair." Representation is not mentioned at all.

> Systemic and institutional bias in tech hiring isn't disproven by of the existence of female-dominated fields. Yes, some fields are female dominated while others are male-dominated. (Such a revelation!)

The point is, do you think it's valid to say that female dominated fields are biased against men with no evidence for bias aside from the disparity in representation? This is what it seems like you're claiming when you write that underrepresentation relative to the population is the same thing as bias.

> It sounds like you're angling for the "male nurses are oppressed by the matriarchy!" trope, or some kind of gender essentialist nonsense.

I agree, concluding that male nurses are subject to bias just because they're substantially outnumbered by female nurses is incorrect. But you wrote "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias." Well, male nurses are substantially underrepresented. If underrepresentation relative to the population is "literally the definition of bias" then it's hard to argue that male nurses aren't subject to bias when they are unambiguously underrepresented.

The point is not that male nurses are oppressed - the point is that they aren't oppressed and thus your definition is wrong. Underrepresentation is not bias. An institution can exactly representative of the general population but also immensely biased - like a tech company that threw out 3/4th of male applicants to make tech roles 50% women - and it can be not at all representative of the population and not biased at all - like a hospital that hires 90% female nurses because nurses are 90% women. Prejudice in favor or against one group can occur or not occur regardless of representation relative to the population.

1. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/bias

You've been breaking the site guidelines by perpetuating this flamewar. Please stop, and please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN in the future.

It doesn't look like you have a pattern of doing this in the past on HN, and (although I've only read a small portion of this thread) I don't see how your comments deserved abuse. But it's necessary to recognize when an argument is going bad fast, and to step away from those sorts of exchanges. HN is for curious conversation, not ideological battle, and when it comes to these tedious tit-for-tat spats the crowd the right hand side of the page because neither party can let go, it really doesn't matter who wins the argument. Actually it would be better to define 'winning' as being first to let go.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Selection bias pushes men towards high-status, high-paying fields and women towards low-paying, pink collar fields. You do realize that if one sector disproportionately hires men, then there are a disproportionately high number of women in the remaining sectors, yes?

Yes, you're right! Contrary to what you previously wrote, "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias" underrepresentation is not the definition of bias. Bias is being more favorable towards some groups as compared to others. The fact that nursing is overwhelmingly women does not mean that nursing is biased against men, because men and women make different choices. If we tried to make hospitals have 50% male nurses they would likely have to institute immense bias in favor of men to achieve representation equal to the general population.

> But beyond the statistical biases, the highly-gendered nature of tech prevents women from being seen as a "good cultural fit" by hiring managers. It prevents women from being encourages to pursue CS in school, and pushes women out of tech when then do manage to get a foothold. Whereas nursing actually encourages men to apply much more proactively because people don't get hilariously defensive if it's trying to be rectified. But I'm certain you have lengthy, sexist rebuttals prepared for how sexism isn't real, with analogous comparisons about on the job sexual harassment and diversity hiring.

Again, you've demonstrated that you fully comprehend that "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias" is not at all the case. If a tech company rejects women wrongfully then they are biased against women - regardless of whether women make up 10% of engineers at the company or 90%. Representation is not bias. Bias is bias.

If you witnessed your company wrongfully reject women candidates from the hiring process then by all means your company was biased against women. I don't claim to deny what you have witnessed. But I've witnessed my current and former companies both set up policies that explicitly bias the hiring process to push the representation of women in tech roles to be closer to 50%, even though the current representation of women in tech roles was larger than the average in our metro area. Specifically it was 19% vs 23%. Were there any women that were wrongfully rejected due to "culture fit"? Maybe. But the end result is still that women in tech were more likely to work at the company than men in tech. Is this biased relative to the general population? Yes. But is the general population applying to engineering positions Dropbox? No, only the subset of those that seek a job in tech are applying to engineering positions at tech companies.

Saying tech companies are biased against female engineers because they make up 20% of their engineers is erroneous and simplistic in the same vein that saying hospitals are biased against male nurses because nurses are 10% men. Hospitals usually only have 10% male nurses because only 10% of people that want to be nurses are men. Likewise, tech companies usually have 20% women engineers because women make up 20% of people that want to be engineers. The people studying engineering are 20% female. Are these disparities due to biases in different party of society? Probably. But saying that a tech company is biased because 20% of its engineers are women, is like saying that a hospital is biased for a 10% male workforce. They reflect the population that has decided to enter these fields. The bias, if it exists, is not in the tech company is in whatever social mechanisms to which you attribute these disparities in nursing and technology. If a hospital takes measures to make men account for 20% of the workforce then they're biasing their hiring process to favor men. The fact that biases in society may be responsible for the fact that male nurses are so rare does not change this fact.

Can you elaborate on what you meant by, "underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias." Your response seems to be contracting this definition rather than supporting it.

> This is a part of it. There is also an unconscious bias against women in hiring. There's plenty of overt sexism, but unconscious biases are significant too. That whole "gut feel"-based hire is remarkably sexist and racist. As are resume callbacks in favoring male and anglophile names.

Chances are you're citing a fabricated study: https://www.vox.com/2019/2/20/18232762/gender-diversity-tech...

Again, when we actually try to identify this bias we rarely find the alleged bias against women.

> As are mentoring and promotional opportunities should one successfully land the job. As is unaddressed sexual harassment on the job.

Neither of which are related to bias in the company's hiring process.

> Re-read my point regarding statistical biases. The existence of a 20/80 ratio is maintained by biased hiring. You seem to believe 20% out of 50% is the "correct" ratio because the current ratio is 20%. And on we go again with your wonderful sexist circular logic.

How do hospitals know that 10% male nurses is the "correct" ratio? They don't, they just give people equal opportunity and because 10% of nurses are male 10% of their hired nurses are male. The whole point is that there is no "correct" ratio. Companies should (and are theoretically obligated to) extend equal opportunity regardless of race or gender. Be biased against no one. If you think your hiring managers are erroneously passing on women, measure this bias and rectify it. Bias isn't eliminated by picking a percentage and instructing recruiters to try and reach that percentage.

When a company tries to pick a "correct" ratio and that ratio is different from the representation of people who work in that rule, bias is usually the result. If a hospital one day decided to institute a diversity program that sets a target of 15% male nurses chances are the hospital would end up being biased in favor of men. Likewise, a tech company that decides to set a target of 30% women engineers when women make up 20% of the engineering workforce is going to end up being biased in favor of women.

You might believe that this bias is justified because of bias women might face in the jobs themselves, or bias earlier in life that you believe is responsible for the fact that only 20% of aspiring engineers are women - all that is your own opinion. But bias you feel is justified is still bias.

The level of abuse that you stooped to in this thread is shocking. I'm going to ascribe it to going on tilt, which happens sometimes when another commenter is extremely wrong, or it extremely feels like they are. We've all been there. But please don't behave like this, or anything remotely close to this, on Hacker News again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Referral candidates definitely get plenty of offers that they "would not have obtained" were it not for their referral status. I think it's more than a bit silly to worry about diversity focus introducing unwanted "biases" in hiring, when it's never really possible for something as random as hiring to be "fair" in any real sense.

There's also the issue of laws that mandate offering equal opportunity on the basis of race and gender. By comparison, I'm not aware of any legislation mandating equal opportunity between candidates with and without referrals.

Furthermore, I'm hesitant to write off discrimination as a non-issue. I don't feel personally impacted by it - but I'm also incredibly fortunate to have graduated from one of the most prestigious universities for computer science, and to have household names on my resume. The fact that my employers don't interview White and Asian men from boot camps doesn't impact me. But what would a white or Asian man think about this situation? The nature of this discrimination is that we don't get to hear the opinions of the people who are impacted by it. We get to talk to the diverse people who were included because of discrimination, but the people who were excluded because of it are absent from our workplaces.

Ultimately, I have no good answer here. Tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Companies are getting criticized for having "only" 20-25% of women in tech roles, when most estimates put the share of women in tech roles industry-wide at 18-20%. So companies have to choose between either enduring criticism and being portrayed as sexist, or discriminating in their hiring policies to increase their diversity numbers. With the techlash in full swing, public perception is important and I don't fault companies for doing the latter.

I'm not assuming. I'm just describing my experiences and what I've seen with my own eyes, a few times. Take it as what it is. Btw I don't assume that women are strictly diversity hires. Nowhere I said that in my statement. There are many many amazing smart women everywhere, even CS professors that I respected during my education are women. I'm just saying that diversity hire exists, that's all.

That is definitely one possibility. If you have studied a lot to get into an X companies and now you also need a lot of luck to get in, then it will deter you from quitting.

So basically, for example, two questions, Leetcode Medium difficulty, there are a few solutions. One can be done in O(n^2) the other one can be done in O(n) (non trivial algorithm). You need to code the O(n) algorithm to pass. You also need to be able to do it in under 20 mins each (total 40 mins, 5 mins for questions to the interviewer and introduction).

Sometimes the non trivial algorithm is an algorithm that you don't know, which in fact, was founded by some famous CS scientist. So in order to do that, you need to have studied that algorithm yourself and apply it during the interview. For example, Robin Karp algorithm, Knuth Morris Pratt algorithm, Djikstra algorithm.