I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.
The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.
If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).
I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.
I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.
P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.
Truly qualified people on the margins are still getting shut out at every level, every age and stage. Mediocrity is still pushing the center ahead of everyone else. The fact that wsj/economist/HN has turned anti-woke doesn't change the facts.
How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.
And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...
It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:
"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"
The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.
Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.
To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.
I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.
Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.
Good catch, I had been thinking of another study which looked specifically at only changing names on resumes. That's:
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
In any event, its not a single study that's looked at this. Have a look at this meta-analysis of 24 studies
Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.
I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.
Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).
I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.
Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.
This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews?
If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought.
> Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate
One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.
Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts.
A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc.
Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines.
Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective.
All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life.
> this is such a difficult problem to solve.
Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.
Maybe Charley had depression and anxiety and never made any friends while Joe is outgoing and did allowing him to form study groups easier. Maybe Charley's parents insisted he become a lawyer and he never touched code until college. Maybe Charley has a speech impediment, maybe he is ugly, maybe he is on the spectrum, maybe, maybe, maybe.
We are here to judge how someone can do the job, not go through their life history trying to judge how much harder or easier they had it than someone else.
You missed the most important part of my point. Someone who crosses the finish line at the same time as someone else, but started from further back is almost always better at doing the job.
I already said it's very difficult to objectively measure. But any improvement in doing so will give you a competitive advantage in finding the best candidates.
The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma, had coping skills that protected them in deployment. When they ran the studies, they found they were completely wrong - people with childhood trauma, regardless of their military success, were multiple times (4-6x odds ratios) more likely to develop PTSD, (re-)start smoking, or misuse substances.
It's a neat narrative: go through hardship + come out the other side = better coping skills / more productivity. However, humans are complex and often fragile.
I accept the argument that a person who has experienced more hardships has accomplished more to reach that same point. That could be justified if your hiring principles are "who has earned this spot more". It doesn't necessary follow that their trajectory has a steeper slope from the point of hiring.
You've also created a strawman. I never mentioned childhood trauma or much at all of early life aside from growing up poor. Whatever trauma that may have caused certainly did not interfere with their accomplishments to date.
> The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma...
This is not war nor the battlefield. Let's see studies about people and their career success.
Any objective evidence to support this? My experience has been the opposite - people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
Just a simple name change on a resume can result in discrimination. Lots of it.
"On average, white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans (95% confidence interval of 25–47% more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since 1989, representing a substantial degree of direct discrimination"
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full
> people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
They really don't. It costs a lot of money to care deeply. Most companies optimize for rejecting too many candidates, looking for red flags as a time saver. This has been common practice for decades. They do it because there are usually a lot of applicants, and it's a cheap way to reduce the numbers quickly.
But it's even worse now. It's has been codified into job candidate filtering software. "Applicant Tracking System software is used by 75% of US employers to help filter job candidates".
"If an applicant's work history has a gap of more than six months, the resume is automatically screened out"
That's the opposite of caring deeply about being objective for who is the best candidate. You are making decisions based on very superficial information.
It does seem objective at first. Because it is objectively looking at one factor and making a yes or no decision. But that's exactly what I meant when I said at only a superficial level. You aren't objectively screening for the best candidates. Instead you are objectively screening for a signal, and not even a good signal. You need to screen humans, not signals.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/automated-hiring-software-rejects-...
You are judging intention based on results. Those are not the same thing.
You said that they care deeply. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large group of diverse people. I proved the results are concerning. Prove they simultaneously care but have somehow managed to make no improvements in decades in the results. Lacking proof on your side, we'll have to judge based on results.
40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.
You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.
This kind of implies that they don't actually hire diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...
Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.
HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.
It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.