[thu2111]

And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.

Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms:

1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities.

2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women.

3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women.

4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately.

5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men.

6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women".

And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men.

BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.

[christophilus]

I’ve seen this, too, at a number of places I’ve worked. Pointing it out always gets you downvoted (or whatever the real life equivalent is).

[Glide]

Committing a Career Limiting Move?

[alp10]

Yep, or to state it in AnimalFarm terms:

If cardinality(pigs + sheep) > cardinality(work horses), the truth will be downvoted.

In software, the work horses need to be more proactive and not give up what is theirs.

[KorematsuFred]

> But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.

Not my claim that Google is bias free. I am not denying what you have claimed, it is just that I have not come across such incidents and if you are a qualified person it is extremely unlikely that I will not judge you performance properly because of your gender, race or ethnicity.

There is no doubt that Google has gone lala SJW route in last few years but then many of us put conscious efforts in fixing those problems.

[Drew_]

Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.

[lucaspm98]

Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.

[joshuamorton]

Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic.

You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.

[thu2111]

Many of those things have absolutely happened in the past at Google. I was told so directly by recruiters and had direct evidence of it myself e.g. I was one of the interviewers that one day started being allocated only female candidates; confirmed by recruiters to be an attempt to boost the numbers. I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well. Facebook experimented with much higher hiring bonuses for women for a while but I believe they stopped (this is in the public somewhere).

The unfireable nature of female engineers there was rather well known, at least a couple of years ago. The last I heard on that was from a fairly senior manager who after a couple of whiskeys reported he knew of managers fighting to keep female transfers off their teams. Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour as just "not being a good fit for the team" and constantly moving them around. I had one on my team who was constantly lying to her teammates, as well as being a completely incompetent coder. For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Some people left the team specifically to get away from her. But, untouchable because the bosses boss was a feminist who thought this young woman with clear management ambitions was just wonderful. Result: she was rapidly promoted into management where she wanted to be, to the disbelief of her remaining teammates.

Most Googlers were never really aware of these practices. Nonetheless, to believe Google is unbiased requires an incredible suspension of disbelief given the rather extreme publicly stated positions Pichai and the remaining senior management have taken, not to mention the Damore fiasco.

[joshuamorton]

> I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well

I've heard lots of things from recruiters that were wrong. So much so that I generally advise people I know to check with be before believing anything a recruiter says. But because they lie on purpose, but because they're often misinformed.

This goes for compensation, process, and policy questions where recruiter statements reliably break with policy and practice. So pardon me if I don't find recruiters to be a reliable source for hot corp goss.

> Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour

Sounds like innate sexism to me, given that the same thing happens with men. It's really hard to get fired. Ive had to deal with (men) not being fired for ages.

> For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before!

Depending on the language and background, this sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect a he java or frontend person to necessarily know hex. So yeah you're making my case for me. Sounds like bias against women.

[lordCarbonFiber]

This line of reasoning doesn't hold up. It's just as easy to flip your conclusion on it's head currently; any given member of a majority group could be viewed as only being hired because of internal biases, not merit.

To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.

[thu2111]

There are no internal biases in favour of men in any organisation, anywhere. This is feminist propaganda - an assumption that if women dominate a field it's because they're good at it, but if men dominate it's because of innate sexism.

Showing bias in favour of women is very easy: just quote the executive leadership saying things like "we want more women", cite pro-women policies or present one of many other pieces of hard evidence. No such evidence exists for a pro-male bias which is why this argument always ends up relying on logical fallacies and innuendo.

[lordCarbonFiber]

The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable. Like, jsut, do some basic math. If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender and compound the fact that people tend to not like working in environments where they feel tokenized, hiring women (or any unrepresented minority talent) is just good business sense, no moralizing required.

Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]

[thu2111]

If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender

Given the differences in the genders of who chooses to study the relevant qualifications, that's obviously a false assumption.

The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable

My comments are phrased in a level, factual manner. They're mostly retellings of things seen or experienced first hand, thus I am myself the source. But if you want sourced evidence of similar claims, by all means, go read the recruiter lawsuit against Google that was filed. It has plenty.

Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims

If you're going to assert a claim is false you need to pick something specific and show it's false, otherwise you're just blustering. And having direct experience of talking to women about this, I can tell you that many recognise the built-in advantage they have and are quite uncomfortable about it.

I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]

It's pretty ironic that you put citation number in square brackets and then don't actually provide one, given your moaning about unsourced claims. As for "essentially no women" you mean about 15-20%, which is far cry from essentially none. It's this sort of thing that justifies my claim of propaganda; it's normal for jobs to have unbalanced distributions of genders. Very few jobs have exactly equal proportions of men and women. For instance HR has a higher proportion of women than software has a proportion of men, but I don't see much talk of the terrible anti-male bias that must obviously pervade the HR industry. /s

[beamatronic]

All of that should be illegal

[pmorais]

Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.

[thu2111]

I used to believe that, when I was younger, new to Google and basically naive about these things.

Having had direct experience of how it works over the years, absolutely, incompetent women are more likely to get through the process. You can't constantly, for years, tell everyone that reducing the proportion of men is a critical priority and not have people bend the rules and make exceptions as a consequence. They're only doing what they're told to.

If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male

Likely the proportion would be higher. But yes, it's hard to change the demographics in areas where hard skills are measurable and where women don't really want to be anyway. Probably that's why feminists are moving on from targeting engineering roles: their current thing is leadership positions where less tangible "soft" skills are more important, comp is higher (the ultimate goal) and it's easier to manipulate the recruiting process. Hence laws enforcing that women be allocated board seats, things like that.

And there lots of men have witnessed women being put into management roles in software they were completely unsuited for, over and over. I think most guys have a story like that by now.

[danielscrubs]

I don't think that people care about how it is actually done, we are all in an in-demand sector. People care about the hypocrisy of companies saying, we only hire the smartest! We don't discriminate! Quickly turning around and saying we need to be more diverse (which is a good thing) so let's throw those CVs out.

And it's always HR... they aren't impacted at all with ok:ish hires.

[dominotw]

i've only seen 2 at my workplace. There are positive incentives for hitting women recruit goals but also there are no negative consequences for not doing so.

[thu2111]

That's entirely a matter of perspective. The exact same policies can be phrased as "your full comp is not available if you hire men".

Fact is, hiring is in the instant a zero sum game. If recruiters are prioritising women it means they're putting men to the back of the queue in the hope they won't be forced to hire them. It's sexism, it's wrong and it makes a mockery of everything feminists claim to believe.