The entire article is based upon former recruiters' frustration that the diversity candidates they brought (the ones that gave them "double points") often did not make it through final scrutiny.<p>They blame "risk-averse white/asian decision makers", but how would they really know that there were no legitimate technical or team-fit reasons behind the rejections ? And how much is confirmation bias helping create that suspicion, when you're financially incentivized to favor these candidates ?<p>Especially at a company with such a high hiring bar, there's a world between scanning keywords on a resume + asking multiple-choice questions in a phone screen, and assessing the depth of a candidate's technical aptness : if sourcers were in a position to make that call, well wouldn't they be called technical managers ?<p>While there might be some truth in that report, it's also not hard to imagine that "losing double points candidates + a pinch of ideology + lack of technical background to deeply assess candidates" might have fuelled enough frustration in disgruntled former employees to take this to the journalists.
Hiring should be done by the team, not by these ridiculous "committees". The metrics and data have clearly shown them to be ineffective at both preventing bad hires as well as the prediction of future employee performance, time and time again.<p>They are still around in companies because it gives "senior" engineers something to do, and it makes them feel good about themselves. From the people I know who work at Facebook, there is a marked lack of work at the higher levels of technical leadership; thus you get these kinds of "committees" that serve no business purpose and actively harm the hiring process.<p>Like I said, the people best suited to do hiring are the people whom will work directly with the person. They need to be able to get along, "like" the other person, respect them, and they need to be smart. There is so much more to hiring and team building than checking off the technical checkboxes, whatever those are. You're dealing with intellectual people (knowledge workers) and an intricate social dynamic.<p>Of course, Facebook's goal is to likely <i>not</i> build great teams. They already have the teams built and self-sustaining that run the actual business. This dog and pony show exists purely to placate to existing mediocre senior engineers who have attained that position through some sort of osmosis effect but who lack talent or real power in the organization.
Serious question: why is this sort of diversity important? As an Asian American man, I can't help but feel slighted when reading articles like this. Why is my status as an Asian any different from other minorities? Why even take race and gender into account in the hiring process for ENGINEERING roles?<p>As a minority I fully understand how race can affect one's perception on oneself, and how societal pressures can make one feel like they don't belong in a certain field. But in this light, shouldn't companies focus more on encouraging women and URM to enter in the field of engineering, and not at the point of hiring? CMV.
TL;DR distinguish yourself on your capabilities, not your race/gender/ethnicity etc...<p>I'm a white American male that went to a CUNY college (city university of NY), which is not so highly regarded by the big 4.<p>I graduated with a 4.0, summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, with distinguished honors in CS and psychology.<p>In 2012 a close friend of mine was a hiring manager in Google, and he passed my resume to a recruiter. When he went back to check on the status of it later, he found that the recruiter had thrown out the resume.<p>After some arm twisting he got me an interview. I answered everything correctly, but was told I would not be getting the job.<p>Since that time I've been with a few startups as an Android engineer. I love my jobs, and work my butt off. On 3 occasions I've been at Google's NYC office consulting with members of the Android team. I've made sure to make an impression on the community.<p>For the past 3 years I've been getting a bi-monthly email from Google and Facebook recruiters asking me to come interview. I haven't, and probably never will; I like the startup scene way to much.<p>I don't think the decision makers are racist or sexist. Their job is to get the best engineer for the job. Initial impressions are hard to gauge, and without validation (education, trusted references, etc...) you can end up making a big mistake (I would know, having hired quite a few duds over the years).<p>I understand that not all people are in a position to distinguish themselves initially. Life isn't fair. Trying to make it fair for one demographic will likely end up making things unfair for another.<p>There's nothing wrong with not getting your first job at a big 4. Hit the pavement running, do a kick ass job wherever you are, and you'll get noticed.
> Facebook started incentivizing recruiters in 2015 to find engineering candidates who weren't already well represented at the company – women, black and Latino workers.<p>Giving different bonuses based on protected classes is erring very close to the line of racial/gender discrimination.<p>Referral bonuses for regular employees are higher for females and POC too.
This is why it is important for companies to emphasize diversity from the beginning, so that it becomes embedded into the company's culture, rather than the same platitudes repeated year after year.
IMO first fix the hiring process for engineers. Asking someone to implement a splay tree, B+ Tree and other obscure algorithms (which is usually Googled 15 mins before the interview or is a pet interview question) in 45 mins is pointless. It has absolutely no corelation to how the potential employee will perform in his/her job. Asking reasonable design questions followed by a simple implmentation is more preferable than a textbook implementation of a typical coding interview question.<p>The other beef I have with hiring is the attitude "we only hire A players". Really? If you are doing work worthy of "A players" then that's fine. But if you aren't (and this is true in most cases), please don't pretend that you do cutting edge work and drop the attitude.<p>Diversity is harder problem to solve. How do you integrate potential employees who aren't from a "privileged" background (I say that in quotes, because I don't mean money)? It has to be trial and error...
The biggest problem with this is the lack of any real supporting evidence for it's claim. As far as I can tell, it relies purely on anecdotal evidence from recruiters presented as fact, rather than any actual numbers. What was the percentage of diversity candidates before and after the program started? What % of those candidates made it through the initial interview phase in relation to white and asian men? What % of diversity candidates were rejected by these committees compared to other candidates? Without this information, all this article does is to re-affirm that Facebook has a diversity problem, but fails to make a credible argument that these committees are responsible for it.
Is there a reason interviews with these large companies are not completely anonymous? Given the nature of these interviews, I've yet to see a good argument for why you actually need to know who the interviewee is.<p>1) If only pedigree matters (e.g. MIT/Stanford) then why have an interview?<p>2) If only intelligence matters why not just give candidates an IQ test and be done with it (if you're skeptical of IQ tests there are many proxies: SAT scores, grades in certain subjects, etc)?<p>3) If only algorithmic problem solving matters (this what big companies currently are doing, AFAIK they used to do the last two, with not success) why do you need to even know who the candidate is?<p>---<p>For startups and other smaller companies I see the value of knowing who you're interviewing. However, an argument could be made there, as well. As long as you can properly articulate the qualities you want in a candidate, and have a way of measuring said qualities* there shouldn't be any need to "know" who the candidate is.<p>[*]If you don't have any way of measuring the magnitude of the qualities then you're just going off a "gut feeling", the same gut feeling that will likely be biased in one or more dimensions, IMO.
> From 2015 to 2016, Facebook’s proportion of women in tech grew from 16 percent to 17 percent, and its proportion of black and Latino U.S. tech workers stayed flat at 1 and 3 percent, respectively.<p>> Facebook has portrayed itself as a leader in the effort, with executives giving public speeches on benefits and best practices.<p>Facebook acknowledged another problem with its metrics reporting and apologized for the inconvenience.
They are also extremely hesitant to hire international candidates (unless they come with an OPT from an US university).<p>If they are rejecting (without interview) a candidate with offers from Google, Microsoft (and several others) who was referred by a high ranking employee, just to avoid sponsoring a visa, the hiring system is extremely out of touch with the engineers.
> getting “diversity candidates” hired at Facebook proved to be such a struggle than many recruiters stopped trying, even with the double point system, and went back to their usual strategies<p>Triple them! Quadruple them! Why not?
> Facebook started incentivizing recruiters in 2015 to find engineering candidates who weren't already well represented at the company – women, black and Latino workers.<p>Isn't this unfair to White or Asian men who might be equally(or more) qualified for working at Facebook? Why Diversity should ever be a goal of a private entity?