Transparency about all past internships, their expectation and accomplishments: http://bjk5.com/post/36067210182/khan-academy-internship-sum... http://bjk5.com/post/8826207372/khan-academy-internship-summ... http://bjk5.com/post/15500332273/khan-academy-internship-fal...
Transparency from previous interns about their work, which I believe speaks for itself: http://david-hu.com/2011/11/02/how-khan-academy-is-using-mac... http://dylanv.org/2012/09/14/the-khan-academy-internship-exp... http://jamie-wong.com/2012/08/22/what-i-did-at-khan-academy/
If any piece of evidence from the above points to an organization that values quotas over excellence in interns and the work expected of them, well please raise the alarm.
We need to get past our default response being a knee jerk assumption of discrimination.
David, Dylan and Jamie are all men yes?
If any piece of evidence from the above points to an organization that values quotas over excellence in interns and the work expected of them, well please raise the alarm.
No one is accusing you of using quotas and no is saying you do not value excellence in interns. What's being asked is why was there such a steep increase in the number of female interns accepted? Were there more female applicants? Were interview questions changed? How did this result come about?
The problem is that there are few female developers to start with, and they are all heavily recruited by large software companies (Google, Microsoft, etc) already. The larger companies have big budgets to devote to this and encourage the very small number of women developers to go work there.
If you just sit back and wait for more women to apply, they are going to get picked up by the bigger companies before you even get a chance to interview them.
It's also difficult to attract that small group of women devs to apply to work at your company when there are no women developers there currently. The larger companies already have a bunch of women developers, so it can suggest to future candidates that these companies are great places for them to work (i.e. they won't be discriminated against at these companies). It may be that your small company is also a great place, it's just that you don't have any women to vouch for that.
So in Fog Creek's case, we increased the number of women applicants by making it our goal to get more women to apply. That's the only thing we changed. Our interview process stayed exactly the same.
Having worked with Kamens, including interviewing the same candidates, I can't even entertain the idea that the interviews were rigged in some way, which is you abhorrent implication.
We see 2:1 male to female ratios all the time, and no one bats an eye. But when it gets flipped we need to figure out why?
Regardless of how it came to be, this is a win for our industry, as it sets an example that the numbers don't need to be so heavily skewed towards men.
Simple probability. A 2:1 male environment is completely reasonable in a gender neutral process, whereas a 2:1 female environment is exceedingly unlikely to occur under such a process.
Is this a 3 sigma deviation? Maybe. Or could it be that, on average, women might be drawn to educational software more than other types? Doesn't sound unreasonable.
Regardless, your insistence on an explanation shows that you're still stuck in the bad old days.
Some hard numbers would help this discussion.
In the same vein it is interesting to ask why most companies receive more male applications. Without asking these questions, how can there ever be an improvement (except for random luck)?
Internships tend to be a bit less one-sided, but the skew is still quite high.
This sucks. I want to receive those resumes, for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I don't ever receive them.
Given that, I can't help but wonder whether:
1) You have a completely different applicant pool
or
2) You somehow changed your application process in a way that resulted in a 2:1 female:male ratio.
I don't think those are terrible questions to have. The answers could be enlightening.
SATs have been criticised for having inherent socioeconomic bias. The validity of both SATs and GPAs, and their appropriateness as gauges of student intelligence, future performance, learning, and appropriateness for use in admissions have all been questioned.
As to how you test for that: why not ask? The SAT and ACT both have an essay portion. Why not ask candidates to write an essay, or tell you in person, about how they've overcome adversity? Also, how is asking interviewees how to solve a programming problem more quantitative than asking them how they've dealt with adversity?
Well you can say that, but I haven't seen any studies that would indicate as such. However, multiple studies have shown that logical reasoning, critical thinking, and mathematical aptitude all lead to better programmers. These are things the SAT attempts to select for.
"why not ask? The SAT and ACT both have an essay portion."
A much discussed and argued about section, precisely due to it's inability to be quantitatively and statistically analyzed.
Admissions officers at multiple schools indicated they gave the essay portion little to no consideration for precisely this reason.
"Why not ask candidates to write an essay, or tell you in person, about how they've overcome adversity?"
To colleges or jobs? For jobs, simply because it's a less efficient method.
"Also, how is asking interviewees how to solve a programming problem more quantitative than asking them how they've dealt with adversity?"
You can measure things about this. Candidate A took N minutes to solve the problem ideally, Candidate B took N + 5 minutes. All other things being equal, candidate A is superior to candidate B.
Furthermore, you can look at things such as programming fundamentals that are easily quantifiable, such as being able to correctly create a log(n) versus n search algorithm, or being able to correctly indicate why log(n) might be superior to n.
Finally, 'adversity' hasn't even been defined in this conversation, so I'm arguing against an ethereal concept. Please define it for me.
One of the biggest problems with relying purely on quantitative data is that you bias the results to those who are better at achieving quantitative goals. EDIT: and your results are inevitably skewed by the test. Are you saying communication and writing capability are unimportant, simply because they're difficult to quantify?
What you're arguing for is, given a choice of bad quantitative tools and OK to mediocre qualitative ones, using the quantitative tools as they're the only way you can measure things. This is a similar argument as to why grades are more important than actual teacher feedback, despite some teachers giving 95% of the class an A, and others giving 20%.
The SAT has a history of discrimination, and, in addition, there are proven stereotyping effects: give self-identifying Asian women a math test, and they'll perform better when you make them identify with being Asian then when you make them identify with being a women[2].
Given how much energy has been spent recruiting me (having me fly out to interviews, organizing tech talks at my school, having employees at the company take me to lunch, etc.), and given that every company I interviewed with asked something along the lines of "tell me about a project you've done recently," which also is a subjective, non-quantifiable question, it hardly seems like an unreasonable burden to ask, as part of the regular interview questions, how a candidate has overcome adversity.
And admissions officers don't give weight to the SAT essay because they have their own essays with which to judge a candidate with. And the SAT just provides a quantitative essay score, whereas colleges can see and evaluate multiple written pieces. And they do often ask questions like how you've overcome adversity. Which makes sense, as they want students who won't give up when facing difficulties.
Wouldn't such a system be very easy to attack, how would you avoid the judges being biased, or the claim that they could be biased? Since judging an essay would probably not be an automated thing at this stage of AI development?
As the person who stands at the end of our hiring process’s pipeline, I find “Mark“‘s idea that we’re sacrificing quality to fill some quota merely very insulting. If I were one of the women who has successfully navigated our brutal interview process, I’d be furious.
This is said as if there is no basis for "Mark's" belief. Affirmative action programs are notorious for establishing two-tier admissions policies for the sole purpose of fostering "diversity". While official quotas are illegal, it's well known that minority students are admitted to prestigious universities with far lower SAT and GPA's that their white/Asian counterparts. What's to make us think that's not what's at work here? Especially given that increasing female enrollment was a high priority given that there are so many "big smiles" when it was achieved. Again, some transparency would be nice.
Edited for spelling and grammar